God, the Bible, and Human Consciousness

God, the Bible, and Human Consciousness

P REVIOUS P UBLICATION Scranton University Press, 2000. New Jerusalem: Myth, Literature and the Sacred. A study of mythic narrative in American literature

God, the Bible, and Human Consciousness Nancy Tenfelde Clasby

GOD, THE BIBLE, AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Copyright © Nancy Tenfelde Clasby, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60543-5 ISBN-10: 0-230-60543-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clasby, Nancy Tenfelde, 1938– God, the Bible, and human consciousness / by Nancy Tenfelde Clasby. p. cm. ISBN 0-230-60543-5 1. Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible—Language, style. 3. Symbolism in the Bible. I. Title. BS511.3.C53 2008 220.6—dc22 2007041295 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: June 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For my husband, Gene, and all my children: Alison, Lance, Sarah, Jerry, Jacob, Erik, Ryan, Matthew, Jamie, and Jessica.

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CONTENTS Preface

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Introduction Logos, Mythos, and Truth

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1 Genesis: Creation and Fall

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2 The Protohistory

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3 The Ancestors

51

4 Existential Exodus

77

5 Power: Kings and Prophets

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6 Job

115

7 Reading the New Testament

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8 Core Teachings

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9 Discontinuities: The Break with Authority

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10 The Passion

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11 The Resurrection

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12 Apocalypse

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13 The Kingdom

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14 Last Things

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Notes

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Works Cited

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Index

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P R E FA C E

It is one thing to take religion as an object of study and another to take religion seriously. —Stanley Fish

T

aking religious truth claims seriously means restructuring modern epistemology. The contemporary matrix for thought, logos, is a precision instrument aligned with logic and mathematical proportions. Its outcomes are univocal and literal. Logos has been so technologically productive that it is the standard for reality-based discursive thought. The Bible and other sacred scriptures are encoded in mythos, an orderly cognitive system based on analogy or comparative thought, rather than the analytical processes of logos. Such symbol systems elude literalist formulation. In this study, I will address the issue of biblical truth claims from the perspective of language formats. Mythos filters instinctively recognized realities—dangers, love-objects—through the format of archetypal images, rendering them as heroes, monsters, princesses, and all the familiar characters of narrative. Worship, like other instinctive behaviors, has epigenetic roots, neural coding predisposing the subject to a given activity (fight, flight, etc.). God is a central archetypal figure in mythos, appearing across all cultures. Like other archetypes, the image of God corresponds to a primary reality, a universal aspect of experience. The nature of that reality is unclear, but the god-image develops in predictable patterns reflecting cultural values. Dismissing religious imagery by arguing that worship is irrational is off-point. One might as well argue that singing and dancing are illogical or that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony doesn’t make a lot of sense. Our most basic activities are conducted with little reference to logic or deduction. We run from danger, we hunt for food, we mate, we dance, and we worship. God, the Bible, and Human Consciousness is an effort to bridge the gap between logos and mythos and to clarify the archetypal structures of biblical imagery, making scripture more accessible to modern readers. It shifts the ground of discussion on such issues as the literal

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truth of the Bible and “proving” the existence of God to another language format. Logos is due for re-evaluation because it has been overextended, applied in areas for which it is not suited. In some contemporary discourse, the language of rationality and clear thinking has narrowed to an exercise in instrumental rationalism. It is useful for sifting through a world of discrete, finished objects that can be counted, valued, and interchanged in precise numerical terms. In these areas, it may achieve objective truth. In evaluating cultural constructs, where counting is not an issue, it falls short of objectivity. Instinctive awareness, personal relationships, moral judgments, aesthetic experiences, value systems—all these realities resist enumeration. Of course, anything can be quantified if it is translated into a technical formula. It is possible (but not helpful) to define the “Hallelujah Chorus” as the product of certain measurable harmonic sound waves. “Happiness is caused by serotonin” may be accurate from a pharmaceutical perspective, but it has limited general application. To avoid reductionism, it seems sensible to reject the notion that logos is a one-size-fits-all measure of truth. It is one format for processing our perceptions, for ordering the flood of raw experience. Mythos is another. Formats count: A DVD will not play in a VCR. Efforts to defend the truth claims of scripture must be cast in the appropriate format if they are to be intelligible. Understanding religion in its own language is important because worship is not going away. Religious strife causes enormous problems in our world, but if we repress religion, or ignore it or literalize it, it is even more dangerous. Herman Melville, who had his own problems with belief, acknowledged it as inevitable: “Take God out of the dictionary and you would have Him in the street” (To Hawthorne, April 1851; Melville 1952, 428). Like all instinctive behavior, religion is directed toward primary realities and is expressed in symbolic imagery. Reductionism—pious literalism and misplaced logos—distorts biblical symbolic structures. Archetypal figures underlie sacred scriptures and secular narrative, and they appear in cognate forms in every culture. They represent developmental realities so fundamental, so perpetually true, that they are encoded as part of the human genetic inheritance. Several new lines of inquiry in the cognitive sciences, in narrative forms, and evolutionary biology converge to suggest that worship appeared at the same evolutionary moment as speech. The capacity for constructing symbols and codes is the hallmark of our species, distinguishing us from other hominids. Infants may experience the sensory world in deep, unmediated ways, but a developed consciousness depends on codes and formats. Werner Heisenberg (1963) noted that, “What we observe is not

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nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Symbols and stories are at the base of human interpretive systems. Storytelling today retains the original narrative patterns of the hero’s engagement with the sacred powers. The fall from the garden and death/rebirth imagery structure modern narrative just as surely as they underlie world myth. Worship is about God, but it is also about power. Tribal gods often appear as natural forces or as formidable animals. Later patriarchal gods are more anthropomorphic, reflecting the power structures of the culture. Except for creation myths, sacred narratives focus more on heroes or demigods who interface with the heavenly powers, molding the divine image to fit human perceptive categories. As tribal structures faltered and power accumulated in the hands of the few, the nature of worship and the image of the hero changed. Tribal and patriarchal culture developed on the model of the extended family where loyalty guaranteed membership. The weak were tended to, and the strong, the heroic leaders, defended against alien predators. In the more structured systems of the later court societies, rulers replaced fatherly gods and concentrated their own power. With the rise of empires and urban cultures, in the Bronze Age, divinity was conflated with the powers of the state. Pharaoh and other rulers were regarded literally as gods. In the “Axial Age” (900–200 BCE), as a response to the great violence perpetrated by warring imperial powers, religious movements arose around the world emphasizing compassion as the key virtue (Armstrong 2006). Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, the Hebrew prophetic movement— all rejected the arrogance and egotism of post-tribal individualism. Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and Islam were late flowerings of the Axial Age; though they differ from one another, the axial religions emphasize peaceful, selfless generosity. They welcome strangers and provide for widows and orphans. In this context, love means calm, purposeful benevolence expressed in practical deeds of nurture and protection. The golden rule, do unto others as you would be done by, requires both self-control and empathy with the pain of others. These axial religions provide a thought-matrix linking love, pain, and pity in a powerful new way. This alignment permitted people, isolated and often enslaved by conquering powers, to love one another as if they had returned to the lost tribal garden. Today that religious matrix is obscured by other goals and considerations. To regain focus on compassion, it is essential to retrieve the symbolic language of the sacred scriptures of the modern world. If we study the Bible as a symbol structure and compare it not only with analogues in other sacred scriptures but also with the multitudes of hero stories in world literature, we come to an understanding denied to

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literalism, both pious and scholarly. Mythos, symbolic thought, opens a door to prerational experience. History overflows with riotous episodes of instinct gone awry; nevertheless, such inbuilt levels of awareness offer irreplaceable insights. Mythos is an essential source of meaning—an ongoing, self-organizing thought-matrix capable of great refinement and subtlety. King Lear and the Book of Job are examples of mythos and cannot be evaluated simply in terms of logos. They are neither true nor false in a literal sense, but they carry deep meaning nonetheless. Archimedes claimed he could move the world if given a fulcrum and a long enough lever. Perhaps it is time to shift the fulcrum supporting modern structures of meaning. If the balance point is moved, the relative weight of meaning will shift. Mythos, now so situated as to be weightless, will acquire gravitas. It is our mother tongue; if mythos can be reappropriated in contemporary terms, taken seriously, rather than literally, our capacity for interpreting human experience will be greatly enhanced.

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4 LO G O S , M Y T H O S ,

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TRUTH

Stories are getting bigger. Cosmologists and evolutionary biologists are

pushing the limits of scientific speculation with daring, controversial narratives about the Big Picture. A broad scholarly movement crossing disciplinary lines, ranging from archaeology to zoology, suggests provocative theories about the origins of all sorts of things—speech, time, music, professional sports. “Big History” challenges micro-history. David Christian makes the case against specialization, calling on researchers to risk taking history back to the Big Bang, reaching across disciplinary borders to broaden the sense of how humans came to be (Eakins 2002, A-17). Micro-scholars are not amused. They “strongly doubt that plate tectonics and the Big Bang might contribute to our understanding of history” (19). They are quick to point out small errors (and sometimes big mistakes). In an age of specialization, big stories inevitably appear somewhat generalist and even amateur. God, the Bible, and Human Consciousness is a Big Bible book. It takes a long view, setting the Bible against a background of other narratives. Projected against the macro-structure of narrative form, the resonant meanings of scripture are more discernible. The Bible is too broad and deep to fit into the usual interpretive formats. Its truths are so immediate, so bonedeep, that they fall outside the conventional limits of critical thought. To grasp the Bible’s meanings, one must step back to see it in the perspective of all narrative and, simultaneously, step within our own minds to bring inbuilt image patterns to consciousness. In the Big Picture, the Bible’s truth claims are far broader than the terms of any doctrinal dispute or squabble about evolution.

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Bernard Lonergan remarks that “changes in the control of meaning mark off the great epochs in human history” (Doran 1977, 30). The modern period is committed to logos, a powerful interpretive matrix related to logic and “that which is rationally ordered, such as ‘proportion’ in mathematics and what we call ‘law’ in nature” (Dodd 1953, 263). Because logos is our own format, it is virtually invisible to us. It is often presented as “reason,” a mental diagram of natural law, pre-existent, waiting to impress itself on the blank slate of the human mind. But logos is a perfectly human construct, a learned skill peculiar to modern Western culture. Its truths are literal, univocal, objective, verifiable, and limited. Though logos is well suited to processing quantifiable data to produce useful outcomes, it is not a universal format for knowing. As a premodern symbol structure, the Bible cannot be successfully translated into the matrix of logos. Patristic and rabbinic systems for biblical interpretation rely on mythos, a complex symbolic language. In premodern society, the highest cultural insights were encoded in ritual and the arts. Today, mythos finds expression chiefly in the arts and does not make truth claims. There are, however, reasons for advancing the case that mythos offers a route to understanding that is orderly, coherent, and deeply meaningful. Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) is a seminal effort to harmonize the thought systems of the humanities and the natural sciences. He sees religious “transcendentalism” and scientific empiricism as locked in competition: “Which world view prevails . . . will make a great difference in the way humanity claims the future” (290). “The human mind,” Wilson says, “evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology” (286). Wilson is confident that empiricism will prevail over symbolic language in the long run. Perhaps instead of opposing the two systems, we can see mythos and logos as forming a continuum of perceptual formats, ranging from the primary images characteristic of the birth of consciousness to the constructs of theoretical sciences. Religious ritual stands at one interpretive pole and mathematics at the other. We devise different metrics for evaluating the virtues of various endeavors. One cannot assess the state of an English department by applying the standards appropriate to physics or psychology. Sacred scriptures, epic poetry, fiction, history, news stories, lab reports, statistical studies are all components in the range of expressive texts. Each is ordered to its own subject matter, uses its own language conventions, and produces its own sort of insight. Bringing mythos and logos into balance would be, perhaps, analogous to the infant’s process of correlating sensory impressions to produce a unified

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experience of the surrounding world. In the womb, before light comes, infants know the world chiefly through touch, the rippling pressures of containment, the turning pull of gravity. At birth, the child falls into the light, a cold and apparently boundless void. Gradually, as the various senses make their reports, outlines and moving shapes resolve themselves into recognizable patterns. Only when the infant synthesizes touch and hearing with sight, smell, and taste does the world of common experience emerge. The senses do not compete but enhance each other and the reappropriation of symbolic thought may lend balance and context to the systems of scientific and mathematical thought. Umberto Eco described a symbol as a finger pointing to the moon. It summons us to look at the light. Alan Watts describes the error of mistaking religious symbols for plain facts. Literalists “look at the finger pointing to the way and then they try to suck it for comfort rather than follow it” (Vardey 1996, 781). Many committed worshippers insist, today, on a literal reading of scripture. Because our culture conditions us to the oneright-answer format of logos, fundamentalists view other interpretive processes as relativistic. Mythos, the language of the Bible, is both universal and especially accommodating to a broad latitude of personal interpretation. One of the founding insights of poststructuralism is that meaning is conditioned by the interpretive patterns culture imposes on experience. What we see is shaped by the lenses we are given. Cultural blinders ensure that there is no transparent window on reality. What finally comes through to consciousness is the product of the standards for retrieval set by the model. Objectivity is always conditional. The certainty that A is B and B is A obtains only in very limited areas. True/false does not exhaust the limits of ambiguity. Until the modern period, biblical commentary proceeded on multiple levels; the literal level, as Augustine said, is for children (1962, ch. 12, 27–28). Some people, he says, “Imagine God as a kind of man or as a vast bodily substance endowed with power, who by some new and sudden decision created heaven and earth . . . These people are still like children.” Augustine distinguishes the “carnal” (literal) level from the “spiritual” meaning, which is a product of reflection and meditation. Typically, biblical interpretation addresses several levels of meaning, such as the medieval categories: literal, allegorical, moral and anagogic, or mystical. In a similar vein, the rabbinic tradition of midrash, biblical study, is supercharged with meaning. Each text has “seventy (an indeterminate but large number) faces or meanings” (Coogan 2001, 481). As Gerald Bruns points out, midrash is not simply a method of exegesis; “its concern is not just with meaning, but also with action in the world” (1987, 628). In the

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epistemology of mythos, choices and actions condition understanding. The wisdom of the prophet is not a product of high IQ or of know-how but of living virtuously. We see the God we have earned the right to see. Since academics are trained to seek precise meanings, they often adopt a professional literalism, relying on social sciences and language theories adapted to logos but not to mythos. A structuralist, for example, may approach the story of Noah by finding and counting other flood narratives in world literature. But if structuralist studies devolve into numerical exercises, compiling uninterpreted lists of floods or twins or endangered children, they lose touch with the referential aspect of symbols. Symbols have referents the way stop signs have traffic and letters have addresses. They exist primarily to convey some sort of meaning. Ignoring content in favor of collecting symbols, focusing on the delivery system, is rather like interviewing the letter carrier instead of opening the mail. It is a form of “archetypal positivism” (Giegerich). Structuralists and other social science–based scholars have been enormously productive in situating the Bible in its cultural context and in opening scripture to postmodern conceptions of history and language. But literalism, whether pious or professional, inevitably obscures the Bible’s symbolic structures and introduces definitions of “truth” alien to premodern epistemology.

LOGOS

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M YTHOS

Logos, the dominant modern system for codifying experience, is so effective in its own sphere that it is difficult to challenge. It is so weighty that other thought systems appear unbearably light. Yet the postmodernist movement suggests that a significant segment of academia is bent on deconstructing the rationalist enterprise. Popular culture, too, evinces a distrust of science in pervasive images of technological doomsday and the takeover of the machine. Such reactions are not necessarily symptomatic of a Luddite revolt; they may reflect instead a sense that logos has been extended into areas for which it is not suited. Logos was conceived in classical Greece at about the time mathematics and logic were developing. It is analytical: X equals or does not equal Y. It is never merely “like it.” Rome adopted logos as an organizational principle for conquest and governance, law, and engineering. The legions, identically dressed, marching in step, were a formidable war machine, quite different from the loosely organized bands of tribal warriors. Bureaucracies imposed Roman order on the conquered peoples, establishing legal and economic systems that reorganized the world to fit the Roman model.

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It was not until the Renaissance that logos was applied to science, leading to the technology that built the modern world. These self-perpetuating, mutually reinforcing elements work to produce streams of homogenous products and ideas that can be valued and interchanged in precise numerical terms. With the ascendancy of logos, control of meaning passed from the symbol-making powers to the rational articulation characteristic of the modern ego and its quest for control. As technology depends on synchronous, duplicable parts to produce identical products, logos rounds off thinking by quantifying and abstracting its objects. That works better in some cases than in others. No one can seriously object to the application of mathematics and logic in their own spheres; we need more logic, not less. The difficulty lies in the application of logos to processes that cannot be neatly quantified. It tends toward reliance on statistics, the elevation of logical distinctions, and the erasure of other distinguishing characteristics that do not affect use. Since logos is a binary system (on/off, right/wrong, us/them) in which one pole is privileged over the other, it projects a picture of conflict and dominance as the order of reality. Like a machine, logos is essentially amoral, a tool oriented toward whatever works. Entities lying outside the parameters of use and control fall below the horizon of consciousness and are overlooked; they become non-things, unreal. Mythos is directed toward consideration of interior processes of growth and development. It is at home with the play of energies, attitudes, intentions, vectors of force that comprise the nonquantified aspect of experience. Whereas logos reflects reality as a structure of intermeshed objects set in mechanical motion (predictable, verifiable, useful), mythos reflects a world in process, living and dying. Nothing is, everything does. Many twentieth-century philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger, have spoken of the kinetic dimension of reality. Temporality, “being toward death,” (Being and Time) is a vital aspect of experience. In a study of Rilke’s poetry, Keith May describes the vast, interactive movement that is the universe: So-called entities whirling from one partner to the next in a vast constitutive dance. The dance is not, so to speak, “optional” for each of its elements: They do what they do because they are in the dance. What they do is what we like to call “what they are,” but in truth there is no such state of being. Nothing simply is and everything behaves. (May 1988, 12)

Because logos posits an objective world in mechanical rotation, it is not fully attuned to the fluid patterns of growth and decline that characterize

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the mortal world. The truths of symbol are about danger and love and the fleeting hazards and delights of experience. Because logos is limited in recognizing these vital, but diffuse realities, it dismisses the image-making faculties as unstructured, free-floating, disconnected from experience. In fact, mythos is far from chaotic or arbitrary. These image-making capacities represent eons of effort to articulate experience and to format it. The laws of mythos are as firm, and as flexible, as the codes of genetic development. It is a consistent, cross-cultural network of symbols. Characters such as heroes, dragons, princesses, mothers, and orphans interact in predictable ways. Toddlers, hearing their first stories, recognize the forms immediately. Mythos provides pictograms representing the usual developmental crisis points and suggests workable responses to them.

T HE C OGNITIVE S CIENCES The convergence of three relatively new insights into the development of language offers a systematic way of understanding symbol. The first involves insights from the cognitive sciences about levels of consciousness. The second derives from structuralist studies of narrative, and the third emerges from studies of evolutionary biology and the development of speech. Let us turn first to developments in the cognitive sciences related to logos as an epistemology independent of instinct and feeling. Studies exploring the mechanisms from which consciousness evolves show that cognitive thought, our normal working level of awareness, is “the tip of an enormous iceberg” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 13). Core consciousness is a vast, underlying network of awareness, shaping many layers of extended consciousness (Damasio 1999, 16–17). In this view, thought is not necessarily disembodied, like a mathematical formula, nor is knowing separable from emotion. Analysis, the separative operation on which logic is based, is a secondary process, an overlay on other cognitive functions. Cognitive science looks past the strategies of logical thought toward more basic forms of knowing. The world engages consciousness from infancy in an ongoing, formative interplay, aligning experiences, shaping our formulations and expectations. “Every living being categorizes. Even the amoeba categorizes the things it encounters into food or non-food, what it moves toward or what it moves away from” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 17). The primary human way of categorizing or imposing form on raw experience is to tell stories. Antonio Damasio describes the advent of

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individual consciousness in the figure of a baby’s first story: “The Organism Interacts with an Object” (1999). This account is a simple narrative without words. It does have characters (the organism, the object). It does unfold in time. And it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning corresponds to the initial state of the organism. The middle is the arrival of the object. The end is made up of reactions that result in a modified state of the organism. (168)

Or, to translate this story into a more familiar scenario, let us say “baby meets bottle, baby loves bottle, baby wins bottle.” Baby’s drama produces the simplest form of “knowing”—the baby “processes the object and feels enhanced” (169). The essence of the drama is a subtle sense of self as defined and purposeful and of the object as a center of interest, pleasure, attention. The child knows itself and the world through the medium of emotion and action.. Most human ways of knowing are shaped by these primal processes. Lakoff and Johnson point out that modern metaphysical thought allows no role for the sort of knowing provided by instinctive awareness. Disembodied propositions and factoids, “this is that,” are late arrivals on the scene of consciousness. Knowing begins in fear or desire and moves through action to a crystallization in symbol. Cognitive processes are seldom pure, keen, accurate. Instead of the transparent truths of logic, the first knowing is expressed in image and story. The primary metaphor in both modern and premodern consciousness appears to be “Life is a Journey.” “Purposes are destinations, actions are motions” (Lakoff and Turner 1999, 60–65). Not to go on the journey is to be lost, to miss the boat, to be adrift, to spin your wheels. A purposeful life, like a journey, requires goals, planning, supplies, maps. There will be obstacles, new scenes, crossroads, wrong turns. Damassio calls the development of metaphor and story a “brain obsession” (1999, 189), beginning early and increasing in complexity and reach as consciousness develops. Patrick Colm Hogan’s study of cognitive science and literature emphasizes the pervasive function of metaphor in language. In “prototypical narrative,” imagery is not an ornament but is the thought itself (2003, xi). Heroes, he says, journey toward the “happiness prototype” (135). This may be “plenty of food” (the land of milk and honey), or social dominance or romantic union, but the protagonists must first pass though famine, exile, and loss. Hogan notes that the standard view, which he does not necessarily accept, is that imaginative literature “provides a sort of ‘off-line’

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practice [for life]. It is a simulation that allows us to hone our skills in different ways without any real risks” (211). Far from being vestigial, the storytelling impulse continues to play a primary role in mental processes. The endlessly repeated tales represent a basic but highly evolved form of cognitive activity.1

N ARRATIVE S TRUCTURE The modern study of narrative, anthropological and structuralist, comes to the conclusion that the characters and plots of all stories are analogous to one another. Cultural dispersal accounts for many similarities among narratives; good stories make the rounds and reappear, slightly modified, in related cultures. The basic narrative framework is, however, universal, independent of the accidents of dispersal. The “monomyth,” a word coined by James Joyce and adopted by Joseph Campbell, is like a “genotype” or intricately sequenced gene structure generating “phenotypes” or particular embodiments of the hero story. Twentieth-century anthropologists initiated the process of recognizing the morphology of narrative; such scholars as J. G. Frazier, Vladimir Propp, Claude Levi-Strauss and Mircea Eliade noted the similarities among myths and folktales. Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, Paul Ricoeur, James Hillman, David Leeming, Robert Segal and many others have traced the archetypal hero myth in modern literature.2 Structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson established a characteristic pattern of narrative, making it clear that certain characters, tropes, and relationships operating by the rules of “grammars” and “deep structures” form the basic components of all stories. Recent studies in cinematography by John Izod, Christopher Vogler, Stuart Voytilla, and others establish the ubiquity of the hero-myth in onscreen storytelling. Cultural variations shape the details, but narrative operates within the framework of a limited number of personae engaged in typical relationships with each other. Aristotle used the term mythos to mean plot—beginning, middle and end—the structural heart of drama and ritual. Modern fiction may focus on a single segment of the hero’s journey or it may feature a failed hero, unable to commit to the task. Some works deemphasize narrative elements in favor of lyricism. John Updike, for example, calls his images of everyday things a form of “hymning” the physical world (Dicken 2004, 73). Stories can be fractured, or presented in streamof-consciousness format, challenging the reader to decipher the pattern. Joyce remarked that he wanted Ulysses “to render the myth sub specie

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temporis nostri” (but from eighteen different points of view [Letters I, 146–47]). Flashbacks, unreliable narrators, withheld information—these alter the reader’s perceptions of narrative. In spite of the wide spectrum of storytelling techniques, the archetypal roles continue to play themselves out. Heroic choice may be represented in nuanced gestures, almost inconspicuous against the background of dinner parties and boardrooms. If a text describes a problem, a choice, and a consequence, it is a variant of the monomyth. Even histories and autobiographies fall into the familiar patterns, arranging the “facts” to fit the heroic model. So many people, so few stories. Sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists have attempted to explain the function of myth-making, and literary critics have traced overlapping figures in modern texts. But the broader implications of myth remain largely unexamined. We know it is there—a “morphic resonance,” a meta-system of symbols stretching across cultural borders. But we don’t really know how myth works or precisely what function it serves. It may provide “practice for life,” but it is far from being simply an instruction manual. In a hidden corner of consciousness, some elegant code generates interlocked patterns of heroes, princesses, wizards, and orphans—Moses, Oedipus, Jane Eyre, Huck, Dorothy, Neo. Not formulaic, not mechanical, but organic, endlessly and productively interesting. When we examine mammalian morphology, we find parallel systems that explain each other. Through comparative study, we learn what noses and tails are for, but our studies of narrative forms lag behind biology. We don’t know what orphans are for.

T HE M ONOMYTH Joseph Campbell, Paul Ricoeur, and Northrop Frye, all pioneers in myth study, present a three-part sequence, beginning in a fragile paradise where a child, a girl or a boy, lives in peace. (“Hero,” like doctor or poet, is not gender specific.) Heroes inevitably fall and encounter dangers, culminating in images of death. With the help of the gods they are reborn and return to the gloriously transformed garden. To illustrate the monomyth, I have chosen premodern stories because the symbolism is writ large— clear and easy to read. Regardless of historical setting, the garden is always lost, remembered only in “the form of a controlled nostalgia for a state of childhood ecstasy that cannot be recalled, or recreated, but remains liminal, just beyond the threshold of consciousness” (Prickett 1996, 152). Some anthropologists ascribe the fall from the maternal garden to the displacement of matriarchal cultures by war-like patriarchies. Others see it as

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rooted in the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture or to the introduction of new technologies in the Bronze Age. Psychologists may relate the motif of the fall to oedipal tensions or to traumatic experiences in early childhood. A theologian might name the fall Original Sin. William Blake calls the barren world “Experience.” For T. S. Eliot, it is the “Wasteland.” The Hebrew Scriptures name it “Babylon,” and the Gospels call it “the World.” Often a mystery or irregularity marks the circumstances of the child’s birth. Oedipus is born as the King’s son, but because of a prophecy, he is put out to die. Arthur is also a prince sent from the palace to live with strangers. Cinderella’s identity is clouded because she is in the power of the wicked stepmother. Joseph is Jacob’s miracle child, born to the beloved but infertile Rachel. He is surrounded by jealous siblings who eject him from the garden. In most narratives, the essential action takes place in the wasteland, as the hero seeks to overcome evil and find the soul, or true self. The heroic way is always dangerous, hidden, and ambiguous. There are no guarantees. But, as Jung observed, the archetypes teach that “anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead” (Jung 1989, 297). Usually, heroes display early signs of their special nature. Joseph is a dreamer, and he wears the special coat his father gives him. Oedipus guesses the secret of the sphinx, Arthur pulls the sword from the stone, Cinderella declares that she will go to the ball, Neo, in The Matrix, follows the white rabbit. Heroes do not rest content in their obscure roles but are intent on formulating their authentic identities. Sometimes they have mentors—Merlin, Tiresias, the Godmother, the Oracle. Heroes resist the oppressive forces aligned against them and, at the crisis, must descend into darkness. Joseph is thrown into a pit, midnight strikes for Cinderella, Oedipus puts out his eyes, Arthur lies dying on the dark shore of Lyonnesse. The transition through death to renewed life is central to narrative. In a ritual setting, this descent is the moment of sacrifice. The word “sacrifice” comes from Latin sacer, sacred, and facere, to make. The heroic relinquishment of life makes the hero sacred, numinous. Because heroes have given themselves wholly to their quests they emerge from death transfigured, fully realized. Emeth, Hebrew for “truth,” originally connoted adherence to the tribal codes requiring loyalty to one’s kin, honoring promises, dealing fairly in trade. In Greek, aletheia, Homer’s word for “truth,” meant the “unforgotten,” denoting the oral tradition of myth. Later, logos, “word,” meant truth, but in the sense of commitment, as in “I give my word.” One of the

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core etymological meanings of “truth” is personal integrity, as in the Middle English “I plight my trouthe,” or pledge my honor. In its oldest sense, to be true meant to be in possession of one’s true self, wholehearted, holding steady, right on the mark. The twice-born hero not only sees the truth but is true. Such transformation is often represented by images of resurrection or rebirth—intensified and heightened life. In this system, truth is action-based, effective, an earned truth, not simply a correlation with fact. Oedipus ends his life as a blind prophet, a truth-teller, who ascends from Colonus following the summons of the Olympian gods. Cinderella marries her prince, signifying unity and fruitfulness. Arthur, the “Once and Future King,” sails to Avalon where he is healed of his mortal wounds. Legend promises that he will return whenever England needs him. Joseph uses his prophetic powers to rule over Egypt and to save his brothers from the wasteland. The hero’s royal identity, at first obscured, stands at last fully realized. At the end of the journey, the hero brings back treasures for the people. Sometimes, as in the story of Beowulf, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Jack and the Beanstalk, or Manabozho, the Algonquin hero, the treasure is presented as riches and gifts. It may also appear in the image of the royal marriage, a promise of new life. The maiden saved from the locked tower or the fiery dragon represents the hero’s true self. The Princess, in Jung’s term, is an anima figure (Latin, “life” or “soul”), an image of wholeness and the promise of renewal achieved at great cost. If the hero’s role is to save the nation, the princess represents the people. In saving them, the prince saves his soul. If he is a poet or a philosopher, the woman is his guide, his muse, Sophia, or Beatrice, leading him to his true self. The treasure essentially represents the achievement of an enhanced awareness, a new level of insight. When the hero succeeds in liberating Anima, the wasteland is restored to life. The risen hero, in his full development, makes new worlds, like his father, the Creator. He transforms the lost garden of origins into the New Jerusalem, the site of full revelation, the unveiling of apocalyptic reality. T. S. Eliot says: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And to know the place for the first time. (“Little Gidding,” 145)

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R ITUAL B EHAVIOR Religious rituals such as initiations, sacrificial rites, and weddings are enactments of various elements of the hero myth. Their purpose is sacramental, to “make real” the significance of the myth to participants. Understood as symbolic gesture, pointing beyond itself, ritual is a treasure, a precious and beautiful illumination of the great passages of life. If the ritual is literalized, substituted for the realities it represents, it drains vitality from worship. To understand the relationship between ritual behavior and reality, let us turn away from current religious ritual to sports, one of the most popular and readable modern enactments of mythic struggle. Team sports are about combat, bonding, strategizing. Each has a different format, valuing different skills—speed, power, dexterity. Like religions, games have sacred spaces—the field, the court. The saints, or heroes, “make the team” and play the game, “making it real” for the fans. The clergy are the coaches, umpires are avenging gods; there are mentors, vestal virgins, totem animals, and vestments. The faithful, the fans, know it is “only a game,” but they suffer vicariously as they follow the team’s ritual re-enactment of the heroic agon. When the players are at their best, acting with maximum focus, they make beautiful music together, and the fans respond, swaying, bursting into song, offering their own music, an extension of the action on the field in another medium. Religion is not a team sport. But like religious rituals, sports are oriented toward realities. They are, on one level, practice for life. Players learn the lessons of competition and teamwork; they gain endurance and self-discipline. Learning how to live is more than a mental exercise. The Duke of Wellington noted the connection between sports and life when he said, “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” Sports, like religious rituals, enact basic communal relationships; they format the give and take of life as a concrete struggle, with a mix of rules, and skills and luck. Sometimes the game hurts; the team loses in overtime. But miracles happen too: “Hail Mary” passes. The players, the initiates, give everything to the game, with the superb abandon marking the hero’s dragon fight. Instinctive behaviors, when ritualized, confer a sense of an ecstatic reality quite different from the common sense experience of the ego. They are celebrations of shared life experienced through the agon of the hero. For the duration of the game, the celebrants offer their whole hearts and minds and all their strength so that the community may live more intensely. Detachment and objectivity are out of place in ceremonial behavior—weddings, funerals, the World Series. Fans cannot be argued

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into giving up on the Red Sox. Allegiances to tribes and teams and religions are immune to argument. In bad years, sports fans may fall away, saying, “Lord, help my unbelief.” Usually they return to the fold, awaiting rebirth: “There is always next year.” Some sports, like hunting, bring us close to the line where ritual meets reality. Hunting tribes, such as the Plains Indians, need their skills to live. Typically, they offer prayer to their prey, asking the Great Buffalo to share his life with the tribe. At that level, sport is not “only a game,” but a plea for shared life. Ritualized gestures are communitarian. To be complete, they require a sender, an icon, or coded meaning, and a recipient. Ceremony binds onlookers to the emotional import of the event, transforming them into participants rather than bystanders in life. They enter the game and experience it as real for themselves. Before the modern period, ritual behavior was grounded in worship. Hunting, racing, and waging war were done under the aegis of the gods. Worship intensified experience. To live was to be synchronized with the divine life, to feel it strongly. St. Paul expresses this identification with the heroic: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:15). Shared life is in the whole and ritual is communitarian; it reaches past individual ego to enact the archetypal truths, opening the door to a universal experience of transcendent forms. In the epistemology of mythos, knowing involves action. Ritual action may offer an aid to living intensely, but ultimately, purposeful action in life is required. People choose to act, to enter the play, or they refuse. Blaise Pascal observed that many people lose themselves in obsessive diversions, such as gambling, because they fear to engage the difficult choices presented by adult life. Those who resist engagement in the heroic drama are, nevertheless, pulled into it as pathetic orphans, failed heroes, or worse, as villains. Choosing to act or to refrain from action is a self-defining event. Rejecting commitment foreshortens experience, narrows vision. Our essential awareness of reality is rooted in our choices as well as in the objective circumstances surrounding us. We see what we choose to see.

T HE D EVELOPMENT

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S PEECH

In addition to the cognitive sciences and studies in narrative structure and ritual, current research in evolutionary biology in the development of speech provides new insights on symbolic language. Speech, art, and worship appeared at about the same evolutionary moment (Burkert 1996, 3–5). They represent the appearance of sign-making, a distinctively human

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capacity. Animals respond instinctively to a great many phenomena, including intraspecies signals, such as snarls and cries of alarm, and in some cases, gesture. Humans developed the capacities for developing conventional signs—words, markings, hand signals—which differ from one culture to another, but which are intelligible to those trained to recognize them. Scholars disagree about the exact point at which representational or symbolic thought appeared, but most agree that it is a determinative evolutionary development. Word and symbol constitute a new format for conveying knowledge beyond the limits of instinctive recognition. Speech is the product of a long and complicated developmental process shaping both the brain and the face/mouth vocal apparatus. Before words, there were things and instinctive responses to things. The coming of language brought meaning about things, a new phenomenon destined to reorient sense experience. Before language, codes and consciously devised signs were unknown. But when the speech apparatus developed, verbal signs replaced pointing, grunts, growls, gestures, and grimaces as the primary mode of expression. Storing and reusing words, constructing codes, and teaching them to others made it possible to learn from instruction instead of personal experience (Burkert 1996, 19–24). In their “word-bodies,” things may be assimilated into consciousness; they can be abstracted, compared with other things, carried about in the mind, exchanged with other people. (When Beowulf speaks, he “unlocks his word-hoard” [30].) Signs, neither physical like their primary referents (tigers, apples), nor entirely disembodied, are mental constructs allowing a dimensional change in consciousness, like moving from a plane surface world to a three-dimensional model. Words began the monumental shift in human attention from the physical particularities of the biological world to patterns of abstract thought. In the Neolithic era, the control of meaning shifted, bringing a triumph of mind over body, code over sense objects, the subtle over the obvious (Burkert 1996, 5). The code-like aspects of speech commanded attention: sounds as signs pointing to objects, grammars as patterns conveying and refining meaning. With this shift in focus, the eye saw signs wherever it looked. It was as if a vast unveiling had occurred. The universe appeared cohesive, not a mere conglomeration of objects. It was orderly, as musical notes are not random sounds but meaningful parts of larger harmonic and melodic structures. Passing seasons and cycling stars were incorporated in consciousness as reminders of a changeless order perceived in the movements of the cosmos. Causal reasoning sometimes led to false attributions of order, as in astrology, but the crucial effect of language was to highlight the orderly patterns of nature. Tribal people retained a lively interest in the

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physical world, but at some point, the balance of attention moved from the manipulation of the biological world toward a contemplation of rhythms and harmonies, a shift from physical objects to formal systems. Things do not change when consciousness awakens, except that, in the new dispensation of meaning, sound can be words or music, events can be stories. From that moment, intelligible patterns, images and formal systems, occupied the core of attention.

W ORSHIP

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Worship appeared with the advent of sign-making. Sociologists, biologists, and anthropologists agree that worship, like other genetically based behaviors, has epigenetic roots. Evolutionary scientists “tend to agree on one point; that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct.” (Henig 2007, 39). The argument for adaptivity is based on the premise that long-lasting and widespread behaviors become so because they enhance group survival. The counterargument that religion is useless (at best) is based on the generally unspoken premise that belief in God is not functional, primarily because there is no God. Most studies of religion and evolution conclude that worship is adaptive, or functional in some way, whether there is or is not a God. Daniel Pals’s Seven Theories of Religion compares the classic functionalist theories of Freud, Durkheim, and Marx. Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion provides an analysis of current scientific thought on the relationship between the evolution of cognition and religion. Many believe that religion is a bonding mechanism offering survival advantages to our ancestors. The serious demands of belief weed out the unreliable members, the lazy, the weak, and endow the group with “the benefits of being in a cohesive group that out-competes the others” (David Sloan Wilson in Henig 2007, 77). The self-sacrifice evidenced in herd-protective behavior can be channeled into strengthening the religious group. Some anthropologists maintain that religion is the basis for fundamental moral codes forbidding theft, murder, adultery and assuring the equitable relationships essential to civilization. Other sociologists and anthropologists think that secular leadership power was enhanced by religious ritual where believers offer obeisance to the angry gods. The submissive behavior of worship could be manipulated to enhance strong

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secular power structures. In more benevolent patriarchal tribes, the image of the wise, paternal god dominates, and the nostalgic recollections of childhood-nurture cement social bonds within the group. Many, like Scott Atran, see belief primarily as a coping mechanism for existential anxieties about loss and death. To the extent that it supports optimism and a sense of future rewards, religion allows a sharper focus on the day-to-day demands of social living. Working within the framework of evolutionary theory it is indeed hard to find a consistent adaptive role for belief. While strong bonding does indeed confer benefits, worship is, from an evolutionary standpoint, redundant. Instinctive social mechanisms for bonding, for sorting out the weak from the strong and active were already firmly in place among our ancestors before modern humans appeared. The imposition of submissive behavior and appeasement can be seen in the behavior of wolf packs and in the dominant male rule of groups of chimpanzees. Instincts older and simpler than religion are at work establishing power hierarchies in prehuman bands. Family loyalties persist even in “postmodern” society and build stronger and more lasting bonds than do most religious institutions. While religion often supports morality, the presence of powerful religious institutions does not guarantee ethical social behavior. For every example of religion-based morality and group coherence, critics can point to greed, corruption, and the enormities of religious warfare between related groups. Finally, the religious function of consolation for loss and fear is often offset by the introduction of guilt and anxiety about divine wrath. In its social consequences, religion is a two-edged sword, sometimes demanding personal sacrifice, even death, as the price of belonging. Scientists who view religion as an unintended consequence of mental development dismiss all adaptationist views (Henig 2007, 41). They see it largely as a by-product of causal reasoning or “agent detection” (assigning agency or purpose to events). In this view, our ancestors became so enamored of imposing narratives that they made up the gods. (“Maybe those falling rocks are just an accident. Or maybe my brother is throwing rocks at me? Or maybe the gods are against me?”) Cognitive tools such as causal reasoning can lead to error by imputing order where there is none. Animals, too, can assign agency; indeed, they are often keenly aware of the signs of predators. They are suspicious, follow up on clues, and sometimes make mistakes in agent attribution. There is no sign, however, that faulty causal reasoning has driven the animals to prayer. Given the centrality of worship and its elevated status in virtually all cultures, it is difficult to accept religion as a mere anomaly, a mistake based on skewed notions of cause and effect. That would be an awfully big evolutionary “Oops!”

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Religion is a late addition to the categories of human behavior, arriving after workable models of agent detection, bonding, and dominance had been established in prehuman groupings. Religion is minor or redundant as a factor in group cohesion, submission to power, and assuaging fears because older and stronger instincts are at work supporting the same responses. The submission of weak group members to the strong was unshakably established before the advent of worship and it continues in secular bureaucracies and social hierarchies at every level. It is difficult to conclude that nature dropped its largely successful systems of ordering primate behavior to devise religion as a redundant, difficult, and downright dysfunctional addendum to the older primate model. Scott Atran points out that “from an evolutionary standpoint, the reasons religions shouldn’t exist are patent” (2002, 4). Religion calls for a costly commitment to typically impractical behavior: “years of toil to build gigantic structures no person could use . . . centuries of crusades to regain possession of an empty grave” (Atran 2002, 6). George P. Murdock’s compilation of the universals of culture lists sixty-seven behaviors present in all societies; they range from bodily adornment through hygiene and weaving (Wilson 1998, 160). Among these behaviors, religious worship consistently presents itself as the most serious, the most elevated. Yet its function is far from clear. “Just in terms of allocation of time and resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning” (Bill Gates, in Atran 2002, 3). Its goals and means are “counterfactual”: (angels, virgin birth, living in the sky). “To take what is materially false to be true . . . does not appear to be a reasonable evolutionary strategy” (Atran 2002, 4). Perhaps this cognitive impasse is a format problem. Worship, like the arts, sports and other ritual behaviors, is not primarily useful. The adaptive model of evolutionary science simply does not fit worship. Religion is an addition to the survival behaviors of the primates, a response to the new order of meaning arising from representative thought. Sign-making, the recognition and imitation of abstract orders, numbers, and grammatical function, opened consciousness to previously unimaginable categories of meaning. Worship is the first response to this revelation. Like the arts, which appeared at the same time, religious behavior is a gesture, an imitation, a sign, an expression of joy and terror at the unveiling of the immensities glimpsed first in language. Religion is no more “useful” than music. “Holy” things, like the Sabbath, are “set aside from common use.” Worship and the arts are not informational, like instruction manuals. They do not move to immediate useful outcomes; they celebrate the perceived harmonies of the cosmos. Once assimilated, the truths of art and religion may

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indeed change behavior, leading to higher orders of moral action. Of course, worship and the arts can be put to immediate use—bought and sold, literalized, manipulated for propaganda purposes. But that is profanation, a “taking in vain.” The social sciences tell us that child’s play is useful, a necessary developmental preparation for the tasks of adulthood. From the point of view of biology, courtship is chiefly a frivolous prelude to reproduction. In this format, useless things are secondary, ignored, or dismissed as unreal. In the broader measures of human experience, the joyful realities of play and games, courtship, the arts, and worship overflow the narrow bounds of utility. Like song or poetry, worship is neither a biological anomaly nor a functional activity. It is communicative, a form of expression, an effort at mimesis of the unthinkably complex processes of the universe. When speech appeared, the evolutionary vector shifted from practical adaptations toward an effort to assimilate the order of being. Religious myth and worship are primary responses to the “first coherence” (Dardel 1984, 281), the advent of meaning. When the doors of perception opened, the human response was worship. Poetry and story, dance, music, costuming, all combine in symbolic recreations of the newly perceived symmetries of the universe. In its beginning, religion was a spontaneous celebration of the glory of order. The rise of consciousness, the epiphany of the word, generated joy, a powerful impulse to participate in the universal rhythms. Happiness is being in step; ritual is a musical Amen: “Let it be, let it be.” Like dance, worship is not directly functional but exists for its own sake—for the joy of it: Praise him with clanging cymbals, Praise him with loud clashing cymbals! Let everything that breathes praise the Lord. (Ps. 150)

Nature’s infinite analogues, its repetitive forms, suggest a primary code, matrix, or format—a unified field of meaning. God appears at the center, the focal point of this essential, defining revelation. In many representations, the divine source appears as a dazzling light, generating meaning, acting as a sort of gravitational force, ordering and aligning meaning in an otherwise weightless, wordless blizzard of sensation. In this vision, God is ultimately inscrutable. The transcendent aspect of the divine is common in religious thought: “His ways are not our ways.” “No one may see the face of God and live.” Divinity is “too bright for our infirm delight,” says Emily Dickinson (1129; 855).

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In the Rig Veda, the chief god is called Prajapati, the All, but his “real” name was a question: “Ka?” or “Who?” (Armstrong 2006, 25). Jesus rebuked a follower who called him “Good teacher,” saying, “only God is Good.” His meaning is not that he, Jesus, is bad but that God is “good” in a way that belongs only to him and cannot be imputed to humans. When we call God good, or just, or intelligent, we ask those words, descriptive of human characteristics, to bear a burden they cannot sustain. Imagine a clever chimpanzee attempting to evaluate Einstein’s intelligence. Cross-species, words short-circuit, fail to function. Though we cannot see God directly, we can recognize him in his glory, in the patterns of the natural world and of our own minds. His glory appears in the splendor refracted in the myriad forms of the natural order. The perceived symmetries of nature and their reflections in art constitute a sort of aureole of meaning. In pictorial art, glory is often represented as a centered burst of light, convergent petals of energy, like Dante’s rose in the Paradiso, where each trembling petal is a saint singing a part in the universal harmony.

C REATION M YTHS Many creation myths depict God’s transcendent nature, his role as the bringer of light and meaning. Often myth uses images of creative words and names to reflect the birth of consciousness, the original epiphany. When word imagery is used in creation stories, light, a symbol of knowing, is often the first outcome. Sanskrit div (or deva the shining one), meaning “light” or “day,” is the etymological source for Greek dios and Latin deus (Leeming 1998, 124). Speech—the word, or vow, or truth—was also “a god, a deva” (Armstrong 2006, 4). In Genesis, God says, “Let there be light.” The Lord delegates the responsibility for naming the animals to Adam, his likeness, who defines his reality by naming it. The animals enter into the world of human meaning when Adam calls them by name. In the Egyptian cult of Atun or Re, the sun god, the light-bearer is also called Khopper or Khepri, meaning “form” (Leeming 1998, 17). One of the verses of his song declares: “My soul is God, I am the creator of the Word . . . I am the Creator of the order wherein I live. I am the Word, which will never be annihilated.” The Babylonian Enuma Elish begins by focusing on naming as part of the creative power of articulation: “When on high the heavens had not been named, Firm ground below had not been called by name . . . When no gods whatever had been brought into being Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined.”

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In the Hindu scripture Manu-Smrti (sic), “The universe existed in the shape of darkness, unperceived, destitute of distinctive marks, unattainable by reasoning, unknowable, wholly immersed as it were, in deep sleep” (Smart and Hecht 1982, 182). Brahma, the “divine, self-existent, indiscernible” desires to create a universe from his own essence. “First with a thought [he] created the waters and placed his seed in them.” The seed became “a golden egg, in brilliance equal to the sun,” out of which, by his thought, Brahma creates the heavens and the earth. In the Hopi myth, Tawa the sun god and Spider Woman “have a mighty thought.” They will make a world from the endless waters by imposing the order of their own song: “So they sat there side by side, swaying their beautiful bronze bodies to the pulsing music of their own great voices, making the first Magic Song . . . a song of light and sound and life” (Leeming 2002, 37). In Proverbs 8, God’s Wisdom is a beautiful woman, Sophia: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.” Wisdom is “beside him like a master worker,” God’s daily delight, dancing before him, rejoicing in the world, delighting in the human race. Creation is joyous play reflecting the dynamic order of divine wisdom. In Sirach 24:3, Sophia emerges, like the word “from the mouth of the Most High.” She is a “breath of the power of God” (Wis 7:25). In a parallel image in Greek myth, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, emerges fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. In Rabbi Nachmans’s tales from the Kabbalah (Buber), the Lord is a great invisible force, unintelligible and unassimilable except through Shekina (Glory), his queen. She assumes earthly forms and mediates his blinding brightness, making the light accessible to humans as reflections of the divine brilliance. Taoism, the Chinese mystical philosophy, describes the Word (tao, “word” or “way”) in this passage from the Tao Te Ching (Leeming 2002, 75): In the beginning was the Tao. All things came from the Tao. All things go back to the Tao.

John’s gospel begins with a meditation on creation and Jesus as the Word of God. The passage looks back to Sophia in Proverbs 8: In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God And the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without Him not one thing came into being. What has

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come into Being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. (1:1–15)

Jesus, identified with the creative Word, is presented as the alpha and omega of meaning. In a similar formation in Hindu thought, Brahma, “the ultimate reality as idea” is beyond all categories of understanding, but manifests himself to human consciousness as Krishna. The Bhagavad Gita (Leeming 125–30) describes Krishna’s epiphany to his warrior friend Arjuna who asks to see the god as he truly is. The unrefracted vision is so overwhelming that the warrior’s hair stands on end and he falls to his knees crying, “Infinite your form! End, middle or again beginning I cannot see in you . . . You are the imperishable, what is and what is not And what surpasses both.” In Kundalini Yoga, the highest revelation is represented as a rainbowhued, thousand-petaled lotus. On it are all the letters of the alphabet, endlessly repeated, singing the enduring presence of all words, the endless glory of all knowing. Every recurring image of “God as Word” is a clue— neither a random mark nor tangible evidence like Robinson Crusoe’s footprint in the sand. Each such symbol, wherever it appears in narrative, is a mindprint leading, perhaps, to the source and center of an inscrutable order. Current cosmological studies propose an analogous harmonic pattern as the source of being. Ten to fourteen billion years ago, “a tiny speck of primordial nothingness . . . somehow filled with intense energy with bizarre properties” (Glanz 2001, 1). This inflation, from subatomic to astronomical, is thought to have occurred in the first trillionth of a second of time. When “nothingness” exploded, it created a superhot, expanding soup that eventually cooled, producing light waves, “the oldest light in the universe” (Wayne Hu, in Glanz 1). The gases produced by the Big Bang are remarkably uniform, but tiny variations, or ripples, thought to have been imprinted by the original dot of energy, provided formal elements allowing the stars to coalesce. The ripples, or quantum fluctuations, set the universe ringing. “The early universe is like an organ pipe with characteristic resonances” (David Spergel in Glanz 2). This modern version of the “music of the spheres” remains unheard, but its main tone and its harmonics reach earth as the cosmic microwave background. The same ripple codes that threw off the stars shape the river of life-forms cascading through time in progressively more complex rhythms. The impossible disembodied dot—not energy, not matter, since neither yet existed—is a modern metaphor for confronting the incomprehensible.

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As a species, we resist the conclusion that reality is incomprehensible. The very basis of human consciousness is structured around recognizing meanings in patterns. Inevitably, the transcendent divinity shown in creation myths is anthropomorphized, made accessible in a human format. As Spinoza put it, “If a triangle could speak, it would say . . . that God is eminently triangular” (Letter to Boxel 1674, 56). Most sacred stories are not about the transcendent creator but about heroes, who, though human, somehow attain unity with the One. God makes very few appearances in the Bible after the opening scenes of Genesis, and his later manifestations to patriarchs and prophets emphasize that he is incommensurate with human categories of experience. Like the sacred stories of other cultures, the Bible proceeds through a sort of shift in attention away from the creator god to various heroes or sons of god or chosen ones who are seen as channels to the divine. These heroes manifest God’s glory as human analogues of the ultimately unknowable order. As we have noted, worship does not fill immediate practical needs, nor is it unique among the many bonding activities of societal life. But, in premodern culture, worship “makes claims for priority and seriousness” (Burkert 1996, 5), outweighing all competing biological and social demands. The motif of self-sacrifice, central to narrative and ritual, flies in the face of the imperative to survive, to get into the gene pool (see Dawkins). In its highest forms, religion dispenses with reward and punishment as motivators for action. The great commandment to “Love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5) formulates the inbuilt directive expressed in the hero myth. This headlong love risks death, driven by the desire to participate in the deeply felt rhythm, the “characteristic resonance” that shapes the cosmos. Nothing, not life itself, is more important than being part of that harmony.

I NSTINCT

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Speech is readily recognized as an evolutionary adaptation, universal and clearly functional. The arts and worship parallel speech in that they are symbol-making activities present in every society. Clearly, they are shaped by cultural norms, but they are in the class of instinctive behaviors. Beyond eating, sleeping, fighting, sex, and death lies a further category of essential human behaviors (Burkert 1996, 4). These include sign-making, technology (fire, tools), exchange, ethics, and division of labor. All these adaptations configure human culture and confer advantages in the struggle to

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survive. The instinct for order revealed in speech and in the arts, though essential, can go awry as can our other appetitive drives. We may see patterns in meaningless data, or misapply data, as in the astrological assumption that the movements of the stars order our lives. Some instincts develop later than others, some become vestigial. Worship and the arts are among the latest behaviors and each occupies a unique place in modern culture. We cannot agree as to how or why they function, but there is no culture that excludes them. The archetypal images of art and worship are “to the psyche what an instinct is to the body” (Edinger in Knapp 1989, 22). Narrative patterns of the hero-myth, like the elements of language, are absorbed early, preconsciously or prereflexively. [The patterns] become a permanent acquisition. Myth is never merely entertained, never used temporarily or for a limited purpose. It is part of our identity. Sometimes thinkers speak of language as a tool. Strictly speaking, neither myth nor language is a tool; both are part of the body. (Scarborough 1994, 95)

We would no more part with speech and stories than with our eyes or ears. As our eyes are oriented toward light, our minds respond to meaning. Instincts are inbuilt rules governing responses to such essential activities as reproduction and the avoidance of danger. They are synchronized with hard realities. In the economy of nature, no instinctive behavior is optional or unrelated to fundamental issues of development. The archetypal images encoded in consciousness and expressed in art and ritual are the trace patterns of developmental imperatives. The archetypes may appear subjective because of their powerful emotional appeal, but they are inbuilt adaptive responses functioning on the same objective level as the drive to seek food and safety. Courtship, warfare, guile, nurture—the typical transactions of life, are expressed again and again in archetypal renderings. Circe and Simon Legree are symbolic embodiments of real dangers that exist in a great variety of tangible forms in the objective world. In view of the primary nature of concerns about survival and sexuality, it should come as no surprise that the psyche formulates models for thinking about them and bringing them into more focused awareness. From that perspective, the archetypes evolved as a sort of survival code, translating complex responses into pictograms. Comic books and nursery tales present simplified forms, like stick figures; ritual and the arts reflect more refined and culturally adapted responses to the essential concerns. Instinctive knowledge is buried so deeply that we seldom consciously advert to it. Just as our hearts beat faster when we recognize a cry of fear,

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we respond to monsters and heroes in books and on the screen. Dragons, though nonexistent, are symbols of destruction and chaos—very real things. Venus represents beauty and fruitfulness—again, real, no matter how difficult to attain. Ritual expression often seems bizarre to moderns, but we acknowledge the objects of instinct as real, existent. There is no instinctive drive toward a nonexistent entity. Just as courtship rituals, no matter how odd, are about real mates, and war dances about genuine enemies, worship is about a real God. Some say that words create reality, that myths make the gods. Chaucer’s Chaunticleer thinks the sun rises because he crows. Do myths make monsters and heroes? If we stop talking about monsters, will they go away? None of the great generic realities can be seen and touched in themselves; love and danger are “out there” in myriad forms but are also imprinted in consciousness as archetypal images. However crudely formulated, the figures of myth represent complex, pervasive realities. They are present, “existent,” prior to our perceptions and encodings. In context of the central role of the divine presence in myth, saying there is no God is like saying there is no love or no danger. The figures in myth are transcriptions of an ongoing internal revelation built into the mind of the species. Holy Scriptures and modern literature are parts of the continuum of sacred revelation. These images cannot be wished away but must be decoded in ways that make them assimilable by modern consciousness. The truth claims of mythos go beyond the pretensions of historical texts. In the poet William Blake’s words, mythos expresses “what Eternally Exists, Really & Unchangeably.” The Bible, Blake said, is “the Great Code of Art.” When speech, worship, and the arts arrived together, they constellated a new and distinctively human awareness of reality. Symbolic representation brought about an axial change in consciousness. Meanings rather than things assumed the utmost importance. In recent findings in Blombos cave, anthropologists uncovered three sharp stone arrowheads, completely symmetrical, painstakingly honed to perfect smoothness: “‘Why so finely polished?’ Dr. Christopher Henshilwood asked. ‘It’s actually unnecessary for projectile points to be so carefully made. It suggests to us that this in an expression of symbolic thinking.’ The people said, ‘Let’s make a really beautiful object’” (Willford 2002). Worship began with the recognition of overwhelming realities beyond the immediately tangible objects of the world of touch and taste. Dance and chant, developed as part of sacred rites, engaged the worshipper in imitation of the rhythms observed in the natural world. The repetitions,

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the stylized gestures and sounds, reach beyond the sense-based world as human reflections of the cosmic order. Enacted in ritual worship—expressed in poetry, music, dance, drawings—the harmonies of the universe displaced eating and sleeping as the vital centers of attention. Sexuality, eating, the hunt were incorporated and re-enacted in ritual, becoming sacred symbols. The fertility rites, the ritual meals, and hunting dances were invested with an intensity beyond that of biological processes. Ritual made sacred the activities of everyday life, lending them meaning beyond their practical purposes. With the coming of symbolic thought, physical objects come to represent perfections beyond themselves. The smooth arrowheads point past the leaping prey of the hunt to other targets. To be is now to mean. In such a world, the sacred myths are pure meaning—holy, raised above the ontological level of commonplace information. Art and ritual are efforts to make the overwhelming brightness assimilable, as Shekhina, the Queen, mediates the light of the Lord for human beings. To create symbols, or better, to be a symbol, to enact it in life, is to be Shekinah, God’s glory. No one may see the face of God, but all feel the pulse of the divine energy. The religions of the Axial Age focused on the compassion represented by the golden rule to do unto others as you would be done by. Beyond that patient and practical care is the great commandment to love God with all one’s strength. The imperative underlying worship is a passionate urge to join in the movement of the cosmic order. Tribal people often imitated the gods in ritual expressions of the need to enter the dance. Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” (1955, 70) captures the ecstatic energy of primal worship: Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn. Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them like a savage source. (91–94)

The windy lake and the trees, “like serafin enter their chant,” and the men, ephemeral as the vanishing dew on their feet, surrender to the perennial necessities of life and death. They “know well the heavenly fellowship/Of men that perish and of summer morn.” The knowledge of death is the portal to full self-awareness. The hero lays down his life and picks it up again, renewed, returning not as the orphan but as the son of the heavenly Father. The savior’s self-defining gesture realizes and appropriates the

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central truth of myth. The consuming love described in the Great Commandment is, in the words of the Song of Songs, “stronger than death.” The repetitions of mythic narrative, the predictable tropes, are mental/symbolic analogues to the repetitive rhythms of dance and the meter and rime of poetry. The sacred stories, chanted and sung in ritual settings, are intonations of the universal word. Expression is inseparable from being; in “Among School Children,” William Butler Yeats considers the being of a dancer, a “body swayed to music,” a “brightening glance.” Can one separate being from expressive gesture? “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats, 2113). As she moves, the dancer realizes herself through gesture. Until she begins, there is no dancer and no dance. We are what we do. Word, dance, music are expressive acts creating a new order and meaning. When myth declares that God is the Word, it means also that God is the dance, the true matrix; we are the dancers; our songs and our smooth arrows resonate in consonance with the holy word. And to be, to be fully present, people must dance with all their hearts and all their strength. Saints and prophets are scarcely distinguishable from the rhythmic system itself. Ritual worship expresses the mighty imperative to move with the universal pulse. The Great Commandment is more compelling than the law of self-preservation. Love with all strength, above even life, the great holy order of the universe. At some point in prehistory, the desire to be at one with the harmonious rhythm outweighed the biological urge for personal survival. Animal instincts to risk life to preserve the young or to drive off attackers were transfigured into a willingness to sacrifice the self for a more intense experience, for entry into the universal dance. The instinct toward God first appears in the instinct toward meaning— the last, beautiful necessity. The divine image is enshrined in the center of consciousness as the medium in which meaning occurs. We can bear anything if it has meaning. Myth describes the tension between the need to fly straight as an arrow to its mark and the limitations imposed by experience—fear and desire. In Sanskrit, the word “sin” means to “miss the mark.” Greek hamartia, translated as “tragic flaw,” is based on hamartanein, to miss the mark, to err. What we call the love of God is the headlong passion to fly to the mark, to be and to mean, no matter what the cost. Demands for safety and personal aggrandizement pale in the light of the final need to act, to fly through the eye of the needle, to say one’s name in a defining choice. The New Testament translates the Great Commandment to love God with all one’s heart and mind and strength: “No

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one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Myth and ritual center on self-sacrifice, endlessly reiterating the hero’s passage into the underworld and triumphant return. Symbolic representation describes the ceaseless heroic effort to forge the soul in mimesis of the universal order.

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“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

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enesis begins with a great hymn to the Creator and his work. Earth “was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2). Dark seas, endless empty wastes without horizon or limit, a silent wind, God’s spirit, broods high over the sea. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). God creates with his word. He articulates reality and light appears in the endless dark. Not the light of the simple sun, because there is no sky, no sun or moon. The daybreak of being, the first constellation of form is the light appearing in darkness. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. (Gen. 1:4–5)

When the good light comes there is an Other, a duality, distinction, multiplication. God sees, for the first time, and he calls the names of darkness and light. He knows them, and they begin to encircle him “and there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” The opening verses of Genesis are a metaphor for the birth of all knowing and doing. Before creation, unimaginable stretches of nothingness— either endless dispersal or an infinite compression, dense and beyond all definitions of energy and matter—without weight, without time, without meaning—a dreamless sleep. The Word—a sign springing from the Creator, emblazoned with the code of his own ordered being, shapes the

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nameless void in his image. Until he spoke God was mute, latent, unexpressed, as were we until we spoke. When he creates life it is self-replicating: “Let the earth put forth vegetation; plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. (1:11)

The seeds of the plants are like God’s word, potent with the codes of their own being. Born from the earth, the seeds quicken in the soil and multiply their own living likeness. “And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and morning, the third day.” Night and day turn in their cycle, while the infinitely complex profusion of living order multiplies. On the fourth day, God establishes the sun and moon and stars: Let them “separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years” (Gen. 1:14). The waters “bring forth swarms of living creatures,” birds and great sea monsters. The first blessing and the first commandment is “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth” (Gen. 1:22).Life and more life is the divine imperative. “Cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind” fill the land. On the sixth day God says: Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created humankind in his image, In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (1:27)1

God’s creative work ends with his own best likeness: humanity, “male and female he created them.” The rest of the Bible recounts the joint creation of history as the product of the contradiction between God and his likeness. His word finds its highest articulation, and hence its limitation, in his human double. Whatever is articulated stands apart, circumscribed by its own formal limitations. It is not everything. The shaping element, soul, brings clarity, distinction, and limitation; it is light against darkness, bright, sharp, and endlessly active. Articulation, the word, is like the flaming two-edged sword at the margin of Paradise, made for light and conflict. God’s double, like the original maker, speaks a defining word. Mankind divides and rules in a broken, painful mimesis of the Creator, fashioning a world in its own limited image. Inevitably, it is a world of

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contradiction. The maker and his shadow child struggle with the limits of form, and that halting dance is all of human experience. But nothing of the mutual agon appears in the first chapter of Genesis. The word generates an increasingly complex evolution of life, culminating in the appearance of humanity. Near the end of Chapter 1 God gives food to man and “to everything that creeps upon the earth, everything that has the breath of life” (Gen. 1:30). The food he gives is “every green plant,” the leaves of grass, the simplest and most common life, giving itself endlessly in a peaceful cycle of replenishment. In this context of fruitful multiplication, having “dominion” means the extension of one’s own shaping principle, as a seed quietly shapes nutrients. The purpose of such dominion is not a larger, aggrandized seed, but an exfoliation, a full development of dormant possibilities. To subdue the world in this way is not to have power over it, but to invest it with the high forms of human consciousness, to make it bear meaning, the fruit of the word. In the originary garden, life is shared. Nothing dies that another may live. The beasts are drawn into the light, subdued in peace and plenty. There is no consciousness of death, no change, no awareness of imperfection or limit. On the seventh day, God rests, blessing the Sabbath day of quiet completion. The first chapter of Genesis is structured in the three-part pattern of myth but diminishes the central section, depicting the hero’s struggle, in favor of the first and final perspectives. The story opens in absolute calm, before the birth of light and dark. The endless evolutionary process of differentiation leads to numberless peaceful multitudes of being. Day and night glide in mutual cycles, a rocking cradle of time. The Sabbath, the end of the story, celebrates another sort of limitless peace. The middle passage through the wasteland, the heroic death-struggle that is the subject of most narratives, is subsumed in the lyric joy of the Creation hymn. God is the hero, forging his soul, his true self, but he is always One—creating in smooth joyous simplicity. “It was good.” Needless to say, the order of the garden does not fully obtain in human experience. Chapter 2 of Genesis is a retelling of the Creation story containing the seeds of an inevitable collapse into nonmeaning. Chapter 1 is thought to have been written by P, the final priestly editor of the Tanakah, or Hebrew Scriptures. According to the documentary hypothesis concerning the editors of the Hebrew Bible, the finished version is based on four documents. The oldest is the work of J, called that because he calls God Jahweh (Yahweh). The second is the work of E who uses the divine name Elohim. D edited the Book of Deuteronomy, and P, the final editor or redactor, is thought to have been a priest or group of priests writing in the sixth century BCE (Harris 2000, 25–41).

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Chapter 2 of Genesis is an older creation story, attributed to J, the first editor. This version begins after God has created earth and heaven. Nothing lives on earth, because there is no rain, only a stream rising from the ground and watering the whole face of the ground. Instead of a gradual progression from simpler forms to human life, God creates man first: The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. (Gen. 2:7)

We are hearing a wholly different version of the creation story offered in Chapter 1. P, the final editor,2 saw this, of course, but permitted the differences and contradictions to stand. Logos demands univocity, but Mythos views differences as enrichment rather than contradiction. Two poems on the same subject add to our understanding through their very differences. Walking around a mountain provides complementary views fuller than the picture from any single vantage point. In J’s version, God creates Adam before any other living thing, breathing his own life into him. Hebrew uses the same word (ruach) for breath, wind, and spirit. Breath here is an analogue for the creative word issuing from God’s mouth in Chapter 1. It informs the dry dust (adamah in Hebrew), and man (Hebrew, adam, human being) becomes “a living being.” As the word play on adam/adamah indicates, “Adam” is not here a proper name but a generic term for humanity. He is Everyman. And the Lord God planted a Garden in Eden, in the East; and there he put the man whom he had formed. (Gen. 2:8)

Eden means “delight,” a primary, unmediated experience of joy—unarticulated, unexamined. The tree of life is rooted here, in the East, where the light dawns. William Blake’s “Infant Joy,” one of the “Poems of Innocence” describes this bliss: “I have no name I am but two days old.” What shall I call thee? “I happy am, Joy is my name.”

Next to the tree of life is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from which Adam is forbidden to eat. A river flows through Eden, dividing it into four branches.

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The four rivers of Paradise hint at the fragility of Adam’s joy. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil will fracture aboriginal unity into the four quarters of the fallen world. In the ancient world, numbers and geometrical signs were symbols as well as quantitative markers. One is the principle of absolute unity—unembodied, self-contained, neither being nor unbeing, as still as the universe before it appeared. One is “a ‘pointal’ number, the bindu or seed in the Hindu mandala” (Lawlor 1989, 12). Two is duality; two points defining a line. Three, the triangle, is a plane surface. “In India it was called the Mother, for it is the channel through which the pure forms of One must pass to embody themselves in the manifest realm of surfaces. The triangle acts as the mother of form.” Four moves from the plane surface to three-dimensional reality: “the first born thing,” the world of Nature, because it is the product of the procreative process: 2 ǂ 2 = 4. As a form, four is the square and represents materialization (Lawlor 1989, 12). The four rivers suggest that the garden is doomed to mortality. As a square, four represents the points of the compass, the seasons, up/down and front/back, the foursquare world of experience. In its cruciform manifestation, it represents the crossroads, the push and pull of fear and desire, the agonizing necessity of choice. If Adam tastes of the fruit of division, Joy will die. Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

Alone, Adam is incomplete. To be fully himself, he needs another. God determines to supply the other as “helper” and “partner.” The terms do not indicate an inferior status for the partner. Indeed, the animals are unable to meet the level of mutuality required and extraordinary efforts are expended to find Adam’s mate. God brings the animals to Adam to name; like God’s word, the names Adam confers define reality. The animal is what he calls it. In mythos, names are not merely arbitrary designations, weightless signs. To know a name, to call it, is to have power. When Adam names the beasts he brings them into his own perspective—he defines them as they relate to humanity. It is as if the animals do not exist in fully realized form until Adam recognizes them. The river of life shifts in its bed, changes course, when it comes into the light of human consciousness. When the nimbus of meaning illuminates the animals they do not

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change individually; they continue in their own perfection. But the direction, the vector of the activity that is all life changes when symbolic thought appears. Adam does not find a partner among the animals: So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this was taken” Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed. (2:21–25)

God causes Adam to fall asleep. He sinks into unknowing, away from the active consciousness that allows him to name the animals. Eve’s mythic role here is to be the anima figure (anima, Latin: “life, “soul”). Adam’s counterpart and soul, his fully realized self, rises from a level below consciousness. The bride cannot be won merely by conscious efforts of articulation but emerges from deeper regions as a product of whole-hearted commitment. The man may not name Eve, thus distinguishing her from himself, until after the fall. Adam and the animals are made from dust; she comes from Adam’s flesh, his heart, his interior regions. In line 22, “this one shall be called woman [ishah], for out of man [ish] this one was taken,” the word ish, man, is used, denoting the masculine gender (as opposed to Adam, “humanity”). Ishah, a feminine form, is used for woman. The details and images of the passage emphasize the unity of Adam and Eve in the innocent garden. “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” All are called to leave the land of the father and mother and to cling to the inner reality of soul. In their innocence Adam and Eve live in infant joy— naked, open to one another, free of guile, unafraid of scrutiny. Their only limitation is that they must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the very next line of Genesis, we hear of the serpent, “more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God has made” (3:1) The immediacy of knowing possible in naked innocence will end, as the serpent’s trickery prevails. The prepersonal, global awareness of infancy gives way

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to the sharpened focus of the developing ego. Not called Satan in Genesis, the snake represents an interior dimension of ego and will. In this psychomachia, the serpent is watchful, self-interested awareness, grown restless and envious of the father’s power. His questions to Eve are a projection of an internal monologue reflecting powerful drives toward control and self-aggrandizement. In many creation myths, the source of evil is a chthonic monster, a dragon, or a sea serpent, representing unruly exterior forces. A serpent is curled about the tree that bears the golden apples of the Hesperides and another guards the tree in Cochis on which the golden fleece hangs. In Genesis, the serpent is interior. His tactic is to distort the primary truths present to instinct. The serpent is a worm of the mind, a keeper of secrets, a rhetorician, a liar. He says to the woman, “Did God say ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’ The woman says, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden’; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” But the serpent says to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:1–5). The serpent begins by focusing the woman’s attention on the single limitation imposed on innocence. As her focus narrows to the forbidden tree, the limitation begins to define her situation in the garden. The inevitable tension between innocence and experience distorts her vision. The serpent accuses God of having a second and hidden agenda. “You won’t die,” the serpent says, “He knows you will become like him.” The serpent’s craft is inextricably bound up with power—the power of self-definition. If she eats the fruit, she will be free, she thinks, of limits imposed from the outside, because she will have become like the one who sets limits. She can remake herself in the image of the powerful lawgiver. Eve projects her own desire for control onto God, then seeks to become the god she imagines. Her lapse is not simply disobedience, but a primary species of idolatrous self-worship. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. (3:6)

The woman’s decision is measured, as she appraises the tree’s value: Good to eat, beautiful, and, on the highest level, producing wisdom. By this calculus, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain. The pair taste the

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fruit: “The eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.” Adam and Eve awaken to their vulnerabilities; in the garden, nakedness meant trust. In the world of fallen meaning it signifies exposure. They must conceal themselves with fig leaves if they are to survive in the world of double meanings. Inevitably, the Lord discovers the deception and punishes it. “To the woman he said, I will greatly increase your pangs in childbirth; in pain you shall bring forth children, Yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall have rule over you” (3:16). Although the passage has long been used to justify the subordinate position of women, it is noteworthy that the power relationship here described is a result of the fall. It is not what the Lord intended, but a tragic distortion of the original mutuality. Eve’s punishment is an extension of her sin. Her frustrated effort at self-definition expands to a lifetime racked by painful desire for Adam, the one who now defines her and keeps her forever estranged from her true identity. Eve is doomed to endless reiteration of her flawed attempt at self-definition. As Gerard Manley Hopkins observed, (1657) the lost are condemned to be “their sweating selves; but worse.” Because Adam listened to his wife and ate of the tree, God curses the very ground from which he came. “In toil you shall eat all of the days of your life.” The pleasant tasks of innocence are now experienced as toil: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread Until you return to the ground.” Simple, natural functions, like childbirth and gathering food, were part of lives lived in a perennial Now, without misgivings, regrets, anxieties. The fall represents entry into a plane of terrible perspectives, requiring strategies, breeding resentment. In the world of appearances, of brooding and scheming, past and present, Now disappears. “By the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread Until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; You are dust and to dust you shall return” (3:19). The spirit that informed the dust when God breathed life into Adam is withdrawn. Soul is lost, dust and chaos remain. The woman is lost to Adam, in that they are separated by their fall into a world of division. Now he may name her as he named the animals. “The man named his wife Eve [life] because she was the mother of all living” (3:20). In her fallen state, Eve is the captive princess of myth, the dragon’s prisoner. Adam is wed to life and to death, since they are inextricably intertwined in the now mortal world. The Lord drives them from the garden:3 “At the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life” (3:33–24).

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Mortality closes the short sad story of the Garden almost as soon as it begins. But Genesis is just that, the beginning. It sets the stage for the rest of the story. The elements of narrative are in place. The hero and the princess are adrift in the wasteland, cut off from their true identities. Soon all the other archetypal characters will play their roles in the narrative. Theologians have often used the story of the fall to comment on the dissonance of evil in a world made by a good and all-powerful God. Thomas Aquinas adopted the Aristotelian concept of free will to explain the anomaly. Freedom is contingent on the possibility of sin; making bad choices is implicit in the right to choose. Sin is inherent where moral choice is a reality. “Nothing can be right in a universe where nothing can be wrong” (Alan Watts, In My Own Way). Adam would have been an automaton, not fully human, had the potential for evil been precluded. This view has had considerable appeal in the modern period because of its emphasis on the will (conflated with ego) as the definitive human characteristic. Faustian and Promethean myths praise heroes who hurl themselves into a search for the limits of good and evil. The indomitable will, even in defiance of divine power, is seen as the hallmark of integrity. Captain Ahab challenges the father: No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. (Ch. 119, 443)

Milton’s Satan, speaks of his “unconquerable will / and study of revenge, immortal hate / And courage never to submit or yield” (Paradise Lost 1, 107–9). Ahab, Goethe’s Faust, Tennyson’s Odysseus—all are forerunners of the Neitzchean fascination with egoism, defiant will, as the highest virtue. Prometheus is punished for stealing fire and delivering it to humanity. Coyote, a Navajo figure, also steals fire and gives it to First Man and First Woman. This pair of defiant tricksters are light-bearers, combining heroism and dangerous defiance. Such renegades are undeniably attractive, in spite of their disastrous choices. Nevertheless, it is difficult to see the repentant pair in Eden as modern Promethean heroes. The Book of Job and the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s death suggest another way of exploring the mysterious linkages between sin, suffering, and revelation. The Church Fathers proposed the concept of the Fortunate Fall, felix culpa. It asks that we consider the relative merits of innocence—life in the garden—and virtue. If Adam had not sinned, humanity would have remained in childlike simplicity. A good thing

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doubtless. But if sin had not entered the world, Christ would not have been born to save humanity. That is, the glories of mature virtue, tried and tested, would never have developed. Heroism is better than innocence. And worth the pain. Or so says Felix Culpa. Associations between breaking rules, suffering, and enlightenment appear in many premodern myths. The story of Psyche (Apuleius, second century CE) records the passage from innocence, through sin and suffering to enlightenment. Cupid, (Eros), the god of love, chooses the beautiful maiden Psyche as his beloved. They live in a blissful garden, but, as in Genesis, the god imposes a single prohibition. Psyche may not look directly at her lover’s face; she is not to know him as he is. Her envious sisters tempt her with lies, as the serpent tempted Eve. When Psyche lights an oil lamp to see the face of the sleeping god, he is so beautiful that she trembles and a drop of hot oil falls on his shoulder, awakening him. He leaves, without a word, and the garden falls into ruin. Venus, the jealous mother god, sets all sorts of seemingly impossible tasks for Psyche to perform as the price for a reunion. At last Venus orders her to go to Proserpine, the Queen of the Underworld, to bring back some of Proserpine’s beauty. Psyche faces all the horrors encountered by heroes as they descend into the underworld of death, but she returns to life with a little box containing the Queen’s beauty. Psyche cannot resist opening the forbidden box; Proserpine’s fatal beauty envelops her and she falls into a deep sleep. Cupid, longing for her, demands that Jupiter grant her immortality. The father consents and gives her ambrosia (from the Olympian tree of life) making her a goddess. Psyche, whose name means soul, is the last created and most beautiful of the classical gods. Her experience of death brought with it a beauty beyond that of Venus herself. Initially, Psyche was forbidden to see the divine face of love, but her sin and subsequent suffering prepared her to bear a full revelation of the divine presence. A creation myth told by the Black Feet tribe of Montana is a simple but moving version of the paradox linking love and death (Grinnel, 289–91). Old Man made a woman and a child of clay. As they were standing by the river, the woman said to him, ‘How is it? Will we always live, Will there be no end to it?’ He said ‘I have never thought of that. We will have to decide.

He tells her that he will throw a buffalo chip in the river, and if it floats, she and her offspring will live forever, but if it sinks they will be mortal. The woman considers this, then says: “No, I will throw this stone in the river; if it floats we will always live. If it sinks people must die. That way

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they may always be sorry for each other.” The woman chooses compassion over immortality. John D. Crossan notes that in Finnegan’s Wake James Joyce plays on the theme of the felix culpa (culpa/culprit, or guilt) calling it “Foenix Culprit” (1980, 23:16), joining rebirth (the image of the rising phoenix) and the “foetal sleep! Ah, fatal slip!” (563:10) Joyce seems to suggest that the awakening from foetal sleep is simultaneous with the fatal slip. The phoenix-pursuit of heroic rebirth brings the culpa or culprit. Consciousness entails pain. From one perspective, the story of the garden describes the genesis of suffering. We would like to separate it from ourselves, to see it as aberrational, the product of malice. Or as something we have somehow deserved. But in a world where all must die and the living feed on the dead, joy and pain are inevitably linked, like the snake perpetually devouring its own tail. Movement in the garden is cyclical: “There was evening, there was morning.” Small children run in glorious circles in a time before time. Then, gradually, a sense of direction emerges, and the children race through linear time, striving to be first. They come to a fork in the road and must choose; every choice involves loss, since the traveler will never return to explore the road not taken. The ways diverge, again and again, and the traveler is adrift in a world indifferent to personal struggle. Choice is pain. Further effort seems absurd, every choice a diminution of original joy. In the wasteland, the traveler meets a blank wall, dumb, meaningless pain. After the fall, the suffering hero begins to emerge as the central figure in myth. Jacob, Job, Jesus—these and their countless mythic counterparts—represent a shift in perspective allowing the hero to accept pain in pursuit of a higher goal. Meaningless, empty pain is transmuted into suffering, willingly endured. Jacob, Job, and Jesus go down, like Psyche, into death’s kingdom to learn to bear the brilliance of the divine visage. At the end of Walden, Henry David Thoreau tells us that he does not expect every reader to understand his meaning. “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake” (Thoreau. 1946. 369). Ordinary waking consciousness is at home in the light of common day. The ego avoids pain but seeks security and control. However, at a primary level, the will responds to the first imperative: “Let there be light.” The heroic ego ventures on a blind path in search of the fullness of light. “There is more day to dawn,” Thoreau says. “The sun is but a morning star.”

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he Protohistory (Gen. 4–11) describes the fallen world before the emergence of Abraham, the first patriarch of Israel. Adam “knew his wife Eve,” and, “with the help of the Lord,” Cain is born and then his brother Abel (Gen. 4). Cain tills the ground and Abel is a shepherd. The brothers bring sacrificial offerings of the fruit of the field and the lambs of the flock. “And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry and his countenance fell” (Gen. 4:4–5). Some current interpretations make Cain the injured party, victimized by an apparently arbitrary and unfeeling God. Traditional readings say God rejected Cain because he knew him to be violent and greedy. His name means “grasping” or “acquisitive.” Abel’s name means something like “empty” or “absent” (perhaps “detached” or perhaps suggesting that he will be lost). Sociologists suggest that the rival siblings may represent the conflict between the settled communities of farmers and the desert nomads, like the Israelites, who roamed the wilderness with their herds. Scripture seems to favor herdsmen over settlers. Cain later founds the first of many sinful cities described in the Bible. Just as Adam is Everyman, the rival brothers symbolize a perennial internal division, a psychomachia. Unity is shattered in the fallen world, and what used to be whole is split in two. God tells Cain he will be accepted if he does well but warns that “sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Cain’s passion is consuming, barely contained, crouching like an animal at the doors of consciousness. If he cannot master his anger, it will destroy him:

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Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:8–10)

The Cain and Abel story is a version of the archetypal motif of rival siblings. The pair, often twins, appear in creation myths as symbols of the transition from life in the maternal garden to struggle in the fallen world. The pairs are sometimes amicable, as in the Navajo myth, “Where the Two Came to their Father” (Oakes 1943). In this story, Monster Slayer (Sun Child) and Child Born of Water, the children of the Father sun and Changing Woman, the moon, leave the land of their mother to seek the father. The twins encounter many obstacles and tests devised by the father, but their mentor, Spider Woman, helps them to pass through the four worlds, four colors, and four directions that frame the Navajo cosmology. After the initiation, they receive new names and return, transformed, to their mother’s home. Although the twins represent divergent aspects of experience—the aggressive, focused power of the solar hero and the reflective, intuitive energy of his counterpart—they are able to complement each other’s strengths. In many myths, the second twin is suppressed, or sacrificed, but in the Navajo tradition, their mutuality allows them to “walk on a trail of beauty” to a final resolution of contradictions. More commonly, the opposite equals, like Romulus and Remus, turn against each other in fratricidal combat. A parallel occurs in Hindu myth in the figure of Hari-Hara, a conjoined figure representing natural oppositions, a dialectic of thesis and antithesis. Hari, one side of the double figure, represents growth and change; the other, Hara, is “the one who takes away.” His name means something like Cain’s name: “seizing, grasping, removing, taking, depriving of” (Norman 1969, 52–54).Even in the myths of struggle, however, the outcome reveals the re-establishment of unity. Evil overcomes good, good descends into darkness, the forces of spirit restore the light.1 The very ancient (third millennium BCE) Sumerian story of two sister goddesses, Inanna from the “great above,” and Erishkigal, the fearsome queen of the netherworld, signifies the reconciliation of opposites. Inanna determines to confront her twin in the underworld and descends through seven gates. At each threshold, she must remove one of the beautiful adornments she wears. When she stands naked before her sister, Inanna is killed, and her corpse is suspended from a stake. After three days, she is rescued by Enki, the god of wisdom, who brings her back to triumphant

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life (Campbell 1968, 105–8, 213–16). Again, the light of wisdom and meaning triumphs over chaos. The violent twin represents a monstrous human propensity common to the species. To the emergent ego, the world appears as a frightening maelstrom of forms. Ego seeks control by establishing a dichotomous pattern, me/not-me, that expands and solidifies into a rigid, sharply dualistic worldview. Joseph Campbell describes the overweening ego as governed by possessive energy, a “monster avid for the greedy rights of ‘My and Mine,’” a “curse to himself and his world” (1968, 15): Self-terrorized, fear-hounded, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself. (1968, 15)

Cain’s sin, “lurking at the door” of consciousness, is the monster “My and Mine.” Images of the warring twins represent the painful psychomachia of internal development and the bitter perception of an alien and uncontrollable social order. Abel’s spilled blood symbolizes the life of the preconscious garden. In killing him, Cain destroys the innocent, intuitive aspect of himself. In Genesis, there can be no full image of the restoration of unity. Cain clings to his limited identity, incapable of detaching himself from his own narcissistic perspective. Abel does not rise again, like Inanna, though he is replaced by a third brother, Seth. Instead, the biblical narrative begins to weave a complex web of death and rebirth imagery associated with rites of sacrifice and images of the displacement of the first-born son.

N OAH ’ S F LOOD The descent into violence comes to a climax in the account of Noah’s flood. The narrative, beginning in Genesis 6, is difficult to read since the texts of editors J and P are interwoven, causing repetitions and contradictions (Harris 2000, 90–91). Much historical-critical research on the flood narrative focuses on tracing sources and analyzing the historical credibility of the events described in Genesis. Literalist readings have been bolstered recently by archaeological discoveries, suggesting that a prodigious flood occurred around 7000 BCE when the Mediterranean breached the land barrier separating it from what is now the Black Sea.2 Whatever the merits of the Black Sea hypothesis, most scholars continue to agree that the Noah

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story is a borrowing from the Gilgamesh Epic (Babylonian, second millenium BCE). Gilgamesh in turn is based on the third millenium BCE Sumerian Atrahasis Epic. There can be little doubt that the familiar story of Noah’s ark is indebted for some of its details to these Mesopotamian myths. So also, the story of Baby Moses in his ark parallels the earlier Akkadian Epic of Sargon, set adrift by his mother. Historical-critical readings see the parallels as products of cultural dispersal—a memorable story, embellished in every retelling. The spread of Christianity has disseminated Bible stories among many native people, who sometimes assimilate them into their own mythologies. In Hawaii, for example, there was an indigenous flood story about a couple who was saved by climbing to the top of Mauna Kea. After the tribe was Christianized, the story was revised to include a houseboat and a rainbow (Stookey 2004, 55). Cultural dispersal is certainly a factor, but it would be wrong to think of Noah, Moses, and the couple on Mauna Kea as mere imitations, pretenders in copycat arks. The analogous figures in archetypal narrative arrive by a complex process characteristic of storytelling across all cultures. Flood narratives are so universal as to challenge most scholarly theories of how stories travel and mutate from one culture to another. A study by Mark Isaak (1997) describes 148 flood myths from sources as diverse as the Ifugao tribes (Philippines), Kabadi (New Guinea), Algonquin (North America), all places far removed from Mesopotamian influence. The number of analogues to Moses and Sargon, the abandoned infant heroes, is also staggering: Oedipus and Arthur raised by strangers; the children of Tagaung (Burma, sixth century BCE) born blind, sent down the river on a raft; Sayatha, Prince of the Mandinka people, born crippled, raised by strangers; Chandragupta, a Hindu prince abandoned in an earthen pot, raised by a kindly farmer. In narrative, the most interesting figures are orphans. It is important not just to establish immediate sources and models but also to interpret the stories in terms of the universal tropes of myth. The details of the Noah story and its close cognates, Atrahasis and Gilgamesh, present archetypal patterns rather like those structuring the creation myths. Order, light, and wisdom triumph over chaos but not easily. Heroic action is required. The Noah narrative begins with a little-noticed episode involving the “sons of God” who take wives for themselves from among the fair daughters of men: The Nephelim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children

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to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown. (Gen. 6:4)

The phrase “sons of god” was common in Canaanite mythology where it described the progeny of the gods. In Job 1:6 and 1:1, sons of God are mentioned as members of his heavenly court. The Lord says of Solomon, “I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me” (2 Sam. 7:14). The reference to the Nephelim may survive in Genesis as a remnant of some earlier phase of pre-monotheistic worship.3 As Ronald S. Hendel points out, “Nephelim” means “the fallen ones,” a euphemism for the dead (1992, 173). They were giants like the Titans, and famous warriors, like Atlas and Prometheus, sons of the Greek pantheon. The Nephelim were swept away by the flood, but a few stragglers survived, like Goliath and the Anaquim, a race of giants Joshua encounters in Canaan. Their narrative role is to die, to disappear from history. When the Lord observes these misbegotten semidivine creatures, he remarks, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred and twenty years” (Gen. 6:3). (Methuselah, one of Noah’s ancestors, lived to be 969 years old.) Hendel theorizes that “in early Israelite tradition, the motive for the Flood was the destruction of the Nephelim” (1992, 170). The mating of gods and humans is analogous to Adam and Eve’s effort to become like God—a hubristic overreach. The later monotheistic editors retain the episode of the Nephelim but detach it from the flood story, substituting a more generalized motive for God’s anger: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Gen. 6:5–6). What follows is the decision to “blot out” humanity and all the land animals, except for Noah, the hero, who “found favor in the sight of the Lord.” God instructs Noah to build an ark 450 feet long and 75 feet wide and to bring aboard his wife; three sons, Shem,4 Ham, and Japheth; and their wives, as well as pairs of “every living thing, of all flesh.” When Noah has done as commanded: “All the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heaven were opened. The rain fell on earth forty days and forty nights” (Gen. 7:11–12). The formula “forty days and forty nights” means a very long time. The flood is not caused by an enormous storm, but by the opening of the windows between the sky and the watery firmament above. The waters of chaos, tamed by creation, flood back over the world. “Everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died” (Gen. 7:22). But God

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“remembered Noah” and “made a wind blow over the earth and the waters subsided.” The wind is the divine spirit brooding over the void as in Genesis 1. The ark comes to rest on a mountain, and Noah opens a window, sending out a raven, which does not return. Next, he sends a dove who can find no dry place to land, and so flies back to the ark. When Noah sends it out again, it returns with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its beak, symbolizing the restoration of order and life. Noah offers a burnt sacrifice, and God is pleased by the odor. (The airborne smoke is the “spiritual” food of the gods of Mesopotamia.) The Lord says, I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease. (Gen. 8:22)

In a promise reminiscent of Genesis 1, where God establishes the orderly progress of the seasons, the natural cycle is re-established, and chaos is banished. God blesses Noah and his family in the same words used in Genesis 1, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” He goes on to say, however, that “The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hands they are delivered” (Gen. 9:2). In a further devolution of the peaceful harmony of Eden, humans are given the power of life and death over the animals. “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” The vegetarian peace of the Garden is replaced by a reluctant but inevitable compromise, based on a reassessment of fallen human nature: “Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood” (Gen. 9:4). Animal life—represented by blood—is sacred to the Lord. God says, “I will require a reckoning for human life” (Gen. 9:5). “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made mankind” (Gen. 9:6). Some have read this as an endorsement of capital punishment for murder. But in the context of the Cain story and these words to Noah, it is clearly an absolute ban on the taking of human life. If the blood of animals is sacred, how much more so is human life, made in the divine image?

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God’s words predicting violent retribution are not a command, but a weary acknowledgment of the way things are. Violence begets violence, and he who lives by the sword will die by it. The Lord than makes a covenant with Noah and all his descendants “and with every living creature that is with you.” He will never again destroy the world with a flood. As a mark of this first covenant, God sets his bow in the clouds. The rainbow represents the warrior’s bow, now hung up as a sign of peace and reconciliation. A new order has begun. In the old Babylonian myth of Atrahasis, the chief god, Enlil, is disturbed by the noisy race of humans: “The people multiplied, The land was bellowing like a bull. At their uproar the God became angry . . . ‘The noise of mankind has become oppressive to me. Because of their uproar I am deprived of sleep.’” To compound Enlil’s problem, people at that time were immortal unless they died from violence or starvation. Enlil fixes on a flood as the solution to his insomnia. He is thwarted, in part, by his advisor, Enki, known for his wisdom. Enki goes to Atrahasis, a wise old man, to advise him to build an ark and bring aboard breeding stock of all the animals. After seven days, the storm abates and Atrahasis sends out birds to look for dry land. Eventually, the ark ends up on a mountaintop. Enlil is angry but agrees with Enki that he will let the survivors live—but with the proviso that human beings will now be mortal and limited in life span. The Sumero-Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh tells a very similar story. The narrative of the flood is framed here by the heroic story of King Gilgamesh’s search for “Never Grow Old,” the plant of immortality. To find the herb, which grows in the bottom of the sea, Gilgamesh must go to an island where the immortal patriarch, Utnapishtim, lives with his wife. The old man tells the hero that long ago the gods became angry with humanity and decided to destroy the world with a “flood weapon.” “Far-Sighted Ea,” the wise god, reveals the plot to Utnapishtim and advises him to build an ark and gather all the animals. While the storm rages, even the gods “cower like dogs crouched by an outside wall.” When it is over, the old man opens a porthole and weeps: “I looked for banks, for limits to the sea,” but there were none. He sends out a dove, a swallow, and a raven. The waters recede and he offers sacrifice on a mountaintop. The goddess Ishtar, grateful that humanity has survived, flings her lapis lazuli necklace into the sky, where it sparkles, like Noah’s rainbow, in remembrance of the great flood. After the old man tells his story, Gilgamesh goes to the bottom of the sea to fetch the flower of immortality, but it is stolen from him by a serpent, and he weeps because he knows he must die.

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In a story told by the tribes of Montana’s Yellowstone Valley, the Great Spirit punishes the people with a flood because they kill a buffalo for sport. A few survivors go to the mountaintop and pray for forgiveness. They find the body of a great white buffalo and stretch the hide across all the mountaintops for shelter. “The floodwaters then begin to recede, and when the sun shines upon the white buffalo’s hide, it gleams in all the colors of the rainbow” (Stookey 2004, 57). In the Roman myth of Deucalion, Zeus determines to send a flood to cleanse the earth of humankind; Prometheus, whose name means “forethought,” is the wise god who warns his son Deucalion to take his wife and ride out the storm in a wooden chest (Hamilton 1940, 74). The couple washes ashore finally on Mt. Parnassus, Zeus agrees to pardon them, and they are advised to “throw your mother’s bones behind your back.” Deucalion recognizes his mother to be “mother earth,” so the pair throw stones over their shoulders that turn into men and women. The “stone people” perhaps suggest human mortality in that they are made of earth. The Algonquin tale of “Manabozho”5 pits the son of the West Wind (spirit) against a chthonic monster, the Prince of Serpents, a deathly white creature from the floor of the sea. When the serpent is wounded, he sends a deluge that Manabozho escapes by going to the highest mountain in the world and climbing to the top of the highest tree. With the help of a loon and a muskrat, who act as his scouts, like Noah’s birds, he is able to survive and establish a new world. The overwhelming sense of the deluge stories is of a very limited and provisional restoration of balance after a taste of aboriginal chaos. The allusions to human mortality, shortened life spans, and so on reflect the fearful limitations of life in the wasteland. Certainly, the flood stories reflect anxiety about death. Perhaps also they represent the fear of being swept away, pulled under by the return of repressed, chaotic emotions. The laboriously constructed ego, the conscious, autobiographical subject, dreads immersion in the floods of instinctive energies. The animal helpers may represent recognition of hidden strength implicit in the hero’s preconscious, instinctive capacities. The stories are framed by images of violence. Fear of diminishment and loss of control lead to anger, like the beast crouching at the door of Cain’s mind. From that flows the chaotic rush of violence. In world myth, the dread deluge occurs, but the subject reemerges, with the help of a wise god, stripped of former identity, standing on a mountain permitting greatly expanded vision. Noah and Manabozho and the others are able to establish new worlds, however diminished and painful they may prove to be.

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In addition to the likenesses associating the Noah story with archetypal myth in other cultures, it is linked internally to other episodes in the Bible. We have noted the analogues to the creation myth of new order emerging from chaos. Northrop Frye speaks of the ark as a giant seedpod, resting on the symbolic mountain at the center of the world. It contains all the codes for the orderly procession of animal life and death that marks the world of history. Frye notes that the Septuagint (Greek) translation of scripture uses the word kibotos for “ark.” Moses, the seed from whom the Law and the covenant will come, rides on the waves of the Nile River in a kibotos. The Ark of the Covenant is a desert ship carrying the Law to Mt. Zion, the world’s highest spiritual point. Jesus was laid in a manger, not called a kibotos, but an open box rather like baby Moses’s ark. The cattle kneeling by the manger hint at Noah’s beasts. In Revelations, the final book of the New Testament, the lost Ark of the Covenant, a desert ship, reappears, sailing in the glory of an apocalyptic tempest (Rev. 11:19)

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The protohistory ends with the efforts of Noah’s descendants to erect a mighty tower. At that time, “the whole earth had one language and the same words” (Gen. 11:1). The people say, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11:4). The tower in question is a ziggurat, the artificial mountains constructed as temples on the plains and in the river valleys of Mesopotamia. Nomadic tribes like the Hebrews worshipped on the mountaintops and viewed the temples as mere imitations, sacrilegious copies of their own sacred places. The name Bab-el means “gate to God” or possibly “city of God.” The builders hope by their own efforts to enter the divine realm. In seeking to “make a name” for themselves, they seek self-definition, just as Adam and Eve did when they ate the forbidden fruit. Clearly, this enterprise will not end well. The Lord goes down to see what’s afoot and exclaims: “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” (Gen. 11:5) Jacques Derrida’s reading, “Des Tours de Babel,” shows God “deconstructing” the powerful monolith of univocal meaning: “Come [the Lord says], let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech” (Gen. 11:7).

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The Lord scatters them over the face of the earth and they leave off building the city. “Therefore it was called Babel [a pun on the Hebrew word meaning “to divide”] because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth.” The story of Babel, told in nine verses, is, in part, a succinct parable reflecting the fear and contempt of a nomadic tribal people for the power of the ancient empires. The autocratic word of the ruling classes was indeed the univocal, uncontested governing force over the people massed in the cities and working the surrounding fields. Cities began to develop about 3000 BCE and were soon to recast all the social forms governing tribal life. The “language” of the cities proved to be an irresistible formative agent, remaking the human world in its own image. Derrida sees the Babel story as a prototype for the rigidities of modern culture and its consequences. The determination to formalize, to use and expand, concentrate and discipline the populace—these are the hallmarks of logos, the univocal homogeneity of modern culture. And it will all be scattered. Just as the Lord “disseminates the Sem [Semites], dissemination is here deconstruction” (Derrida 1991, 6). Derrida does not, of course, regard deconstruction as simple destruction. He describes the dismantling of the artificial binary constructs of consciousness—modern or ancient, psychological, political, or linguistic. In the story of Babel, the Lord, whose name, “Yahweh [is] an unpronounceable name,” represents the overflowing boundlessness of reality. Modern literalists tend to see the Lord of Babel as a jealous, anti-intellectual meddler, and indeed, he is presented as fundamentally in opposition to human ambitions for power. He scatters the “Sem” as a farmer scatters seed, so that the identical, hard-shelled kernels of abstraction may, in time, burst into the polysemic glory of embodied forms. As in the story of the fall, the human urge to become god-like, to forge one’s own powerful name, leads to collapse and diminution. Yet, as in the image of the fortunate fall, something great may come from seeds fallen into the ground.

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4 THE ANCESTORS Now the Lord said to Abram “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Gen. 12:1)

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he call to Abram announces the passage from the poetic myth of origins to myth realized in history. Ordinarily, the issue of the Bible’s historicity is approached on a literal level: Was there really a man named Abram? Or are the patriarchs fictional characters? Beyond a few lists of rulers’ names we have little positive evidence corroborating the court histories of the ancient world. The possibility of finding independent records of an obscure tribal chieftain like Abram is virtually nil. In any event, the oral traditions underlying Genesis do not reflect logos-bound factuality. They are archetypal narratives, coded to carry universal meaning, while reflecting the viewpoint of the Hebrews. When dealing with archetypal narratives, “the question is not Did that event happen in the past? but Is that meaning always happening, is it eternally true?” (Bruteau 1996, 61). “The stories are about us”; everyone must, like Abram, leave the land of the fathers to be blessed. There is a constant truth in the stories of the Patriarchs, even if they were never lived out by men named Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is fair to say, however, that the biblical editors envisioned a unique relationship between their covenant and history, and they took care to conserve and reproduce their own traditions, even preserving, as we have seen, variant readings when they were aware of them. For many thousands of years, tribes of hunters and gatherers lived in a timeless seasonal round. Their lives and archetypal stories changed little

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over the generations. About eight thousand years ago, the agricultural revolution brought crops and domesticated animals, perhaps first to the valleys of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates. The necessities of planting and harvesting led to a more settled way of life, and, eventually, to larger populations because of the creation of food surpluses. More food and more people are obviously a positive thing, but there was a downside as well. Robert McElvaine, historian and biologist, notes: “Farming required harder, more consistent work than did hunting” (2001, 88). In the old patterns, the tribe could be sustained if the men hunted four days a week and the women gathered two or three days. Farmers “exchanged a life of relative ease with enough to eat and few possessions, for a life of hard work, enough to eat and economic surplus” (McElvaine 2001, 17). As the settlements grew into cities and empires, the concept of land ownership and wealth evolved. Class structures coalesced and the means of social control grew more rigid. Bronze weaponry and the domestication of horses created mobile warrior classes who lived by stealing herds and looting villages. Eventually, war and slavery were institutionalized among the marauding and competing empires. McElvaine calls the old hunter/gatherer society a “lost Eden” (2001, 97). The “biogram” before the fall promoted a cooperative, easygoing life, not yet divided into fixed periods of work and leisure, not requiring great self-discipline or systems of enforced laws. It was a simple time that Hesiod would describe as the Golden Age. The biblical patriarchs, nomadic herdsmen, lived at first in the “golden age” but were soon caught up in the growth of empires and the concentration of power in urban areas. As the social order changed, so did ways of thinking. Maurice Leenhart’s study of tribal life in Melanesia describes the growth of complexity and refinement of technique in crafts, “when calculations and measurement” came into play (1979, 240). The “intelligence of the hands” seeks to find the most intricate woven pattern, the best formula for strong metals, the conformation of the fastest boats. Counting and measuring, “the core of all rational thought,” begins with the struggle to create things both beautiful and useful. As trade increased, writing and counting assumed more importance. In the process of seeking greater precision both for crafts and in the development of more complicated political systems, symbolic thought was slowly literalized. Urban power centers increasingly dominated tribal people and imposed more literal ways of thinking. Pharaoh does not symbolize the Sun god, he is the Sun God. Art and worship were put to work as bulwarks of the social order. What had been in, tribal times, free, communal expressions were formalized. The development of writing, money, law,

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and the concentration of imperial power combined to produce a more abstract language oriented toward control and use. Logos, the modern matrix, is rooted in this process of literalization. The biblical claim to represent historical persons in mythical framework was a new departure in narrative. The patriarchs are not demigods like Manabozho or Gilgamesh, nor are they powerful god-men, like the pharaohs. The sacred scriptures of tribal cultures reflect a changeless cycle of experience. The Hebrew Bible breaks the cycle in three ways: it particularizes myth by investing it in historical personages, and it proposes an end point, the apocalyptic Day of the Lord, representing the fulfillment of the mythic cycle and the end of history itself. More importantly, the biblical heroes offered a direct challenge to the concentration of powers and the feudal class-system characteristic of the ancient Middle East. “History” is largely a record of power and its uses—the acts of victorious princes in the setting of a dominant culture. This defining view of history began, perhaps, with Emperor worship, conflating historical figures and the sacred actors of myth. Some ancient religions accommodated to empire by preaching unconditional obedience to authority. Others coped by detachment from the fallen world, finding consolation in asceticism, or by looking forward to rewards in an afterlife. The Bible presents an alternative to history as a chronicle of power; it presents history as a record of purposeful human struggle, beginning with the introduction of the journey theme in the Hebrew Bible. The patriarchs and the Law reject the power of Pharaoh and the despotic kings; the biblical heroes play self-sacrificial roles, risking themselves, presenting a genuine alternative model to Pharaoh, the narcissistic, power-driven ego characteristic of individualism. When Abram leaves the ancient cycles of his homeland and sets out in search of a mysterious blessing, he becomes the archetypal hero stepping into a new order of history. Worshippers of whatever sort cast the divine powers in the mold of familiar power sources. The gods of hunting and gathering peoples are projections of natural forces, represented in sun gods, wind spirits, totem animals, and the reproductive cycles of nature. These figures are multiple, and generally harmonious, though quite capable of furious outbursts. Heroes like Manabozho, the Algonquin demigod, represent a further anthropomorphism, signifying the human strengths of courage and cleverness. In ancient court cultures, like Egypt and Babylon, the rulers asserted their divine status; the Babylonian emperor celebrated the liturgy of New Year’s by “becoming” the god Marduk and setting the stone “Tables of Fate” for the next year. The populace, in contrast, was “savageman . . . charged with the service of the gods that they might be at ease”

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(Enuma Elish, in Smart 1982, 6–7). Egyptian mummification rites were at first only for Pharaoh, and, though gradually extended to the aristocracy, the common people were never thought capable of the heroic journey into the underworld. A figure like Manabozho, representing human strengths in a tribal context, signifies the potential for heroic development in a community of equals. When the power of the state is divinized by projection onto the ruler, the hero myth narrows and hardens into literalism—the “letter of the law,” “graven in stone.” Literal gods are stone idols representing the dead hand of the past, the weight of entrenched power. The changes wrought by the accumulation of imperial power were not in the political/religious realm alone. Imagery associated with the great pagan kings reveals a profound change in human consciousness. The modern ego begins with these isolated, powerful figures who thought of themselves as omnipotent. Like the builders of Babel, they sought to “make a name for themselves.” The Bible records and judges this long, crucial process through the lens of the historical experience of the children of Abraham. It offers an alternative to the megalomania of Pharaoh in its rejection of imperial paganism. The biblical response to paganism is not merely a proprietary skirmish over who has the better gods. The Mosaic law offered a surrogate for the lost communality of tribal life. Where imperial edicts are imposed unevenly and reflect the interests of the ruling classes, the Law, entered into voluntarily, through covenant, is meant to apply equally to all and fosters equitable relationships among the members of society. In addition, the heroic ancestors and prophets represent, in their commitment and suffering, a model of transformative development counter to the princely egos of the Mesopotamian god-men. The revelation to Abraham occurred at just the moment, in all the long stretches of human prehistory, when tribalism faltered and modern systems of command emerged. The Law and the suffering hero have been the essential counter-forces to the centrifugal energy of tyrannical power. Abraham is the mythic hero called to leave Ur, the oldest and darkest of cities. He is called Abram, a provisional name, and his beloved wife, Sarai, is barren, a symbol of their immersion in the wasteland. When Abram accepts the call, God promises him abundant life, children like the stars in the sky. In myth, the hero’s commitment is often represented by struggles with terrible beasts, tyrants, demons of the underworld. Abraham’s struggle is interiorized; the symbols of his defining confrontation with danger are ritually expressed in three acts of sacrifice: the first is an animal offering, the second is circumcision and the last is the akedah, or binding of Isaac.

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When Abram is first asked to commit himself in covenant, he expresses self-sacrifice through conventional animal offerings (Gen. 15:7–21). He splits the carcasses and stands among them, driving scavenger birds from the carrion. As the sun sets, a trance falls on Abram, “and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.” At nightfall, a “smoking fire-pot and a torch” passed between the pieces, signifying God’s entry into the arena of death, and his commitment to the Covenant. As will be apparent in later instances, the patriarchs’ encounters with the divine are dark and mortal agonies. God’s fiery passage through the midst of the slaughtered beasts suggests his participation in the life and being of the victim and a subsequent healing or unification of what has been divided. Inasmuch as the animals represent Abram, he has been symbolically consumed and assimilated. Karen Armstrong describes the central role of sacrifice in Aryan tribal life in the fifth millennium BCE. These tribes spoke Indo-European, the language that formed the basis of Sanskrit and several other Asian and European languages. The Aryans believed that creation began with an act of sacrifice. The gods placed a plant, a bull and a man in the center of the sterile earth. “It was not until the gods performed a triple sacrifice—crushing the plant, and killing the bull and the man—that the world became animated” (2006, 5). Plants flowered, and animals and people emerged from the bodies. The rituals indicate that the tribes “realized that their lives depended on the death of other creatures.” But the taking of animal life, essential to human survival, was to be recognized as a sacred re-enactment of the original sacrifice. No animal, neither game nor livestock, could be eaten unless it was ritually returned to its divine source. The Aryan tribes crushed soma stalks to make a sacred intoxicating drink. They chanted an invitation to the gods and prepared the fires for burnt offerings. The sacrificial rite “ended with a holy communion, as priests and participants shared a festal meal with the deities” (Armstrong 2006, 6). These rites, common in the ancient world, emphasize the unity of the natural world with the divine. In world myth, the sacrificial dismemberment of the divine primordial being is called the Ymir motif, after the Frost Giant named in the Norse creation myth (Stookey 2004, 213). The Chinese creator, Pan Ku or Pan Gu; the Babylonian hero, Marduk, who dismembers the earth goddess Ea; and other gods in Aztec, Japanese, Mayan, and Peruvian stories are examples of the Ymir myth of the sacrificial death of the creator god. The stories parallel the hero myth’s depiction of the passage through death to regeneration. Abraham’s offering of animal sacrifice affirms his covenant with the Lord, but it is not fully realized, because Abram remains childless and less

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than fully committed. Sarai counsels Abram to accept her Egyptian slave girl, Hagar, as a surrogate for herself. Hagar bears Abram’s firstborn, Ishmael. As we shall see, the image of the first born as sacrificial victim is entangled with the theme of the displacement of the first born by his younger brother. After she becomes pregnant, Hagar looks “with contempt upon her mistress.” Sarai, furious, insists that Abraham send her rival away into the desert. The two wives are locked in struggle; Sarai, the beloved first wife, overcomes her shadow-figure, but in the process, Hagar is cast in the role of sacred victim. The Lord, however, will not be satisfied, since the offering of a substitute is an imperfect sacrifice. He intervenes to save Hagar. As she lies despairing in the wasteland, an angel appears and tells her to return to Sarai, for God will bless her with a multitude of descendants. Hagar calls the “angel” Lord (Gen. 16:13) and exclaims, “You are ElRoi [the God who sees] . . . Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?” Hagar, victim and alien, is the first to see God’s face and live. Years go by, Abram is ninety-nine, and the Lord again appears, reiterating the “everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring.” This time, the sign of the covenant will not be animal sacrifice but circumcision. Every male in his household must be circumcised. The mark of the promise is to be inscribed in the flesh of Abram’s children, a bloodletting at the very life source. As a further sign, the Lord changes Abram’s name to Abraham and Sarai’s to Sarah (Gen. 17:5). The symbolism of name change, common in rites of passage, presents an alternative to egotistical efforts to “make a name for oneself.” Unlike the builders at Babel who sought to define themselves by an exercise of power, Abraham’s true name is earned by his willingness to face suffering. Ritual enactments of heroic sacrifice in initiation ceremonies suggest that transformation is possible only through unconditional and painful commitment. When the Lord assured Abraham that Sarah would bear a son, Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is one hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” (Gen. 7:17)

Abraham lies on the floor in a posture of submission, while laughing under his breath. He tries to persuade God to accept Ishmael as the surrogate for the promised child: “O that Ishmael might live in your sight.” God will not accept a substitute and replies, “No, but your wife Sarah shall bear you a son and you shall name him Isaac” (Gen. 17:18–19).

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A short time later, the Lord reappears in the form of three angels, or three strangers, who approach the Patriarch’s tent. Abraham begs them to accept his hospitality and prepares a feast for them. After the meal, it is clear that the “angels” speak for God. “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” Sarah, who is listening at the door of the tent, “laughed to herself, saying ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’” The Lord asks, “Why did Sarah laugh? . . . Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” Sarah’s laughter points to the common-sense conclusion that the whole business of the covenant has been absurd. Even at their advanced level of commitment, Abraham and Sarah doubt the promise. She denies she laughed because she is afraid, but God responds, “O yes, you did laugh.” The promised son is born exactly nine months after this epiphany. Isaac’s name is taken from the Hebrew verb, “to laugh.” At his birth, Sarah says, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me” (Gen. 21:6). Or perhaps God has the last laugh after all. At the end of the scene the Lord asks himself, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?” (Gen. 18:17). (He is about to judge Sodom and Gomorrah.) He decides that since he has chosen Abraham for his righteousness he will confer with him. When Abraham hears of God’s anger at the cities (His nephew, Lot, lives in Sodom), he intercedes in a most diplomatic way: Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing! (Gen. 18:23–25)

The Lord concedes the point and Abraham pursues his moral advantage, bargaining God down to the bottom line: if ten just people are found, the city will be spared. Unfortunately, for the cities, God’s assessment of them proves correct. When the angels go to Sodom, Lot proves to be the only just man. The others attempt to rape the angels; Lot offers his virgin daughters in their stead, but the crowd attempts to seize Lot and his guests. So God rains down fire and brimstone, saving only Lot and his daughters.1 This remarkable episode displays the evolution of the divine manifestation or, more precisely, the evolving human capacity to recognize the divine. To the Pagans, who live by violence, God continues to manifest the

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frightful, destructive powers unleashed in Noah’s flood. But Abraham, who has entered into the Covenant, finds the Lord responsive to his calls for justice and restraint. People recognize only the god they are prepared to see. As Emerson says, “If we live truly, we shall see truly” (“Self–Reliance”). In mythos, our acts and choices condition our perceptions. When Isaac is born, his parents rejoice in him. But as her child grows, Sarah becomes jealous of Hagar and Ishmael and again demands that Abraham cast them out. “The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son” (Gen. 21:11), but the Lord reassures him that he will make a great nation of Ishmael: “Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child and sent her away.”2 Hagar is in despair and raises her weeping voice to God. He hears her, promises that he will make Ishmael the father of nations, and opens her eyes to a well, from which she draws water for the boy. The two exile episodes (doublets) are bound together by puns on God’s name, “He Sees” (El Roi; Gen. 16:3) and Ishma-el “God hears” (Gen. 21:17). The imagery of the woman by the well prefigures Rebecca, Rachel, and Zipporah, matriarchs who first appear as they are drawing water from wells. Ishmael’s endangerment in the wilderness foreshadows Isaac’s sacrificial journey into the wilderness with his father. Both boys are saved by angels. The third call for sacrifice, the Akedah or binding of Isaac, comes to Abraham in Genesis 22:3 “After these thing God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I shall show you’” (Gen. 22:1–2). On the appointed day, Abraham rises early, cuts the wood for the sacrificial fire, and sets off with Isaac and two serving men. “On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.” Erich Auerbach (1992) notes the aesthetic impact of the spare imagery: “Thus the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a progress which has no present, which is inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies ahead, and which is yet measured: three days!” (Auerbach 1992, 120). When he sees Mt. Moriah ahead, Abraham sends the two young men back, and lays the wood for the burnt offering on Isaac’s back, “and he himself carried the fire and the knife.” As they walk on together, Isaac says, “Father!” Abraham replies, “Here I am, my son.” The child sees the fire and the wood, but asks, “Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” His

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father replies “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” And so the two walk on together (Gen. 22:7–8): “Abraham builds an altar on the mountaintop and stacks the wood for the fire. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son” (Gen. 22:9–10). At that moment, an angel calls out “Abraham, Abraham.” “Here I am,” he replies: “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son from me.” And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. (Gen. 22:12–13)

When the call to sacrifice the child is understood literally, it poses a monstrous conundrum. God’s test appears to be arbitrary, an imposition on hapless Abraham. His “obedience” seems perverse, almost mad. In Abraham on Trial, Carol Delaney mentions a man who, in the 1990s, heard a voice ordering him to sacrifice his child and did so. “Why is the willingness to sacrifice one’s child the quintessential model of faith, why not the passionate protection of the child?” (Delaney 1998, 5). In Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard provides a classic articulation of the responses of many modern readers. He pictures the boy pleading on his knees for his life. He imagines Sarah’s fears. Finally, in Kierkegaard’s meditation on the text, Abraham seizes the terrified child by the throat: “Stupid boy, dost thou then suppose that I am thy father? I am an idolater. Dost thou suppose that this is God’s bidding? No, it is my desire” (Kierkegaard 1999, 119). In explanation of his action, Abraham tells God, “After all, it is better for him to believe that I am a monster, rather than that he should lose faith in thee.” In a literal reading, the Lord ends up on the same moral plane as Moloch, the child-devouring idol. Many traditional readings of the Akeda respond protectively, rejecting the literal meaning: God never meant for any harm to come to Isaac. The test was only a formality because he knew that Abraham would be faithful. Such traditional readings are effective in fending off the blame generated by a literal reading, and they reflect an accurate understanding of the responses of the initial audience. Before it was ever written down, the Akedah was ritually recited for countless generations; people grew up with it. No one was surprised at the outcome, no one worried about Sarah’s response or thought for a moment that the Lord would take the boy’s life.

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Modern readings sometimes impose an anomalous suspense and anxiety foreign to the traditional tale in its context. Jacques Berlinerblau accounts for some of the interpretive difficulties by pointing out that the work of two redactors, J and E, are interwoven in the text. J describes Abraham fighting aggressively to rescue Lot and arguing to save Sodom. The Akedah, where Abraham seems passive, is the work of E. The mix of editors produces “many intriguing possibilities of meaning . . . Few if any were intended” (2005, 49). Anthropologist Mary Douglas suggests another aspect of the Akedah that bears on the difficulties modern readers experience in their readings of the story. Douglas says that the story is an example of “ring composition,” a common structure in oral literature. Reading such a tale “as if it were a straight linear composition will miss the meaning” (Douglas 2007, 10). Ring composition is a structure of parallel incidents beginning with a theme, developing it in symmetrical episodes and returning to a restatement of the theme. The Akedah begins with the greeting, “Abraham,” “Here I am.” It moves down through a series of steps, ending in “Abraham raised his hand to take the knife to slay his son.” Again, God calls him, “Abraham.” “Here I am,” and the upward movement begins, ending with the words, “Because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will bless you indeed.” Ring composition is an example of a figure of speech called “chiasmus,” common in oral literature, but almost unknown in modern writing (see note 3, Chapter 1, p. 234, this volume). The resonance and repetition of ring composition parallel the U-shaped structure of the hero myth, beginning in the stability of the garden, falling into the wasteland and working its way up in a loop to the New Jerusalem. Christian exegetes emphasize the mythic aspects of the Akedah narrative by using typological readings. Isaac bearing the wood on his back is a type of Christ carrying the cross. The ram suspended from a thorny tree points to Jesus, suspended, wearing a crown of thorns. Abraham’s sacrifice prefigures the Lord’s sacrifice of his only son. Mt. Moriah, which is unknown, is said to be the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (or possibly Calvary; Augustine 1999, 114–16). This reading stresses the archetypal significance of sacrifice but focuses narrowly on a Christian reading. If we look at the three sacrifices of Abraham as a mythic progression, we see a rising curve of meaning. Animal sacrifice, circumcision, and the command to offer Isaac move from impersonal offerings to deeply intimate sacrifice. When the Lord asks for Isaac, he says he is “testing” Abraham. Some tests are extrinsic: the testing authority devises and imposes an exam on the student. “Jump!” says the master, “How high?” asks the student. Such tests imply a master/slave relationship or, at best, a contractual

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obligation involving assessment and reward for accomplishment. From the point of view of orphans in the wasteland, tests, like most things, just happen to them. “Test” also hints that the command is “only a test,” and God may not be in earnest. Abraham’s first sacrifice, livestock, is a conventional extrinsic offering, quid pro quo, an animal for a blessing. By Middle Eastern hospitality codes, the gods were indebted by the sacrificial meal they had been offered, and would be obliged to reciprocate. The second sacrifice, circumcision, is more intrinsic. It calls for painful personal commitment, not the mere exchange of goods. It suggests an understanding of covenant as a mutually willed agreement, like a marriage. Such commitments indicate a will to circumscribe one’s choices and thus to define oneself. Abraham and his God now exist in relationship to each other. In this framework, testing is a lifelong effort to maintain fidelity to the vow of love. The third sacrifice, calling for the death of Isaac, is, on the face of it, shockingly inappropriate: unlimited life for Abraham, in return for the death of his child. Set against the background of myth, the command to sacrifice Isaac assumes a different meaning. Heroes must confront dangers—monsters, oppressive tyrannies, and the like. Stories demand crises, often involving the self-sacrifice of the hero on the field of battle. In other stories, the sacrificial gesture is played out quietly. Many heroes humbly wear themselves away in personal acts of justice and compassion. Ritual sacrifice, however expressed, signifies the actor’s adherence to the great law of love. Some lay down their lives to save the princess, free the people, or, in the case of martyrs, to affirm some higher truth. A certain detachment from ego allows them to envision something beyond themselves, worth more than their own lives. Abraham is willing to sacrifice the first born, the child of the promise and source of eternal life—“children like stars in the sky.” The child represents Abraham’s soul, his true self, but he does not cling to his life or to his destiny. The Lord does not need Isaac’s life as a sacrificial surrogate because the father’s life is given over freely into his hands. Carl Jung, in analyzing the Akedah says this: The self is the sacrifice, and I am the sacrificed gift, the human sacrifice. Let us try for a moment to look into Abraham’s soul when he was commanded to sacrifice his only son. Quite apart from the compassion he felt for his child would not a father in such a position feel himself as the victim, and feel that he was plunging the knife into his own breast: He would be at the same time the sacrificer and the sacrificed. (“Transformation Symbolism in the Mass,” Jung 1956 CW 11, 397)

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Until the time of the command to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham has kept his commitment, but, like most heroes, he is imperfect. He laughs quietly at the Lord’s promise of children, and is heavyhearted about the exile of his son Ishmael. When confronted with the sacrificial death of Isaac this imperfect man is faced with a challenge beyond risking his own life. In countless versions of the myth, the protagonists offer their lives in combat because it is in their nature to do so. Abraham had earlier showed physical courage by rescuing his nephew Lot when he was kidnapped by warlords. Whatever mixed motives may enter into real-life decisions, in myth heroes choose freely. Their choices endanger them but also define them. Their willingness to sacrifice is not monstrous, not imposed by authority, but freely chosen. The tests heroes face are intrinsic to their identities, not products of coercion. In myth, the only true sacrifice is self-sacrifice. The priestly victim says, “This is my body, my blood.” God’s command to take Isaac’s life is so shocking, so intense, because it projects the image of the victim away from the hero and onto the child. Shedding innocent blood is the essence of chaos—life spilled for nothing. The blood cries out from the ground, like Abel’s blood. If the child is understood to be a symbol of infinite life, of the true, fully realized self, God’s command is even more disorienting, for the spirit child is the very object of the heroic quest. Even that final treasure must be given over— the transpersonal, overflowing life promised by the covenant is itself foregone. Few heroes have faced such absolute destruction. The reader is in “fear and trembling” at the enormity and paradoxical nature of the sacrifice. But in making his choice to relinquish his life, symbolized by the child, Abraham becomes the source of boundless life. Heroic sacrifice symbolizes full commitment to the great commandment enunciated in Deuteronomy 6:5. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This injunction follows the Deuteronomic restatement of the Ten Commandments and sums up the covenant relation to God. Such love is not affection, not romantic passion or devotion to family or cause. The Great Commandment is not an extrinsic law that everyone really ought to obey. The love it describes is the quintessentially human manifestation of order in the universe. That love is mankind’s way of responding to the force that moves the stars in their orbits. The story of the fall links the development of ego with sin, “missing the mark.” Pulled off course by fear and desire, orphans try to make names for themselves, devoting themselves to delusional goals, acquisitive efforts to maintain power, to prolong life. Abraham knows his name and answers the call, “Here I am, Lord.” Heroes are focused, throwing

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peripheral concerns aside in favor of an unswerving flight to the invisible center. Edward Edinger (1986, 34–35) sees the ram tangled in the thorns, the eventual victim, as a symbol of Abraham’s ego, a self-aggrandizing energy that obscures true vision. In the distorted perception of ego, God appears as a primitive, indiscriminate force demanding sacrifice. The true God demands the sacrifice of the ego and offers a renewed identity in return.

I SAAC Genesis devotes little attention to Isaac’s adult career. He is “a relatively passive figure, more notable for what is done to him—his youthful brush with sacrificial death and the deceptions perpetrated on him in his old age—than for anything he initiates himself” (Harris 2000, 112). When Isaac is grown Sarah dies, and Abraham decides to find a bride for Isaac among his own ancestral family members. He dispatches a trusted servant who asks God for a sign to help him recognize the bride. “Let the girl to whom I shall say, ‘Please offer your jar that I may drink,’ and who shall say, ‘Drink, and I will water your camels’—Let her be the one” (Gen. 24:14). Before the servant is finished speaking, Rebekah appears at the well, a beautiful virgin carrying a water jar on her shoulder. She offers water to the servant and his camels and invites him to her father’s house. There the servant gives her golden jewelry and asks for her hand. Her brother Laban asks if she wishes to go to Isaac’s home. She agrees to be his bride, and the servant brings her to Isaac’s tent. “He took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death” (Gen. 24:67). Though they love each other, Rebekah is barren. At last, she conceives twin boys who struggle with each other in her womb. She asks God, “If it is to be this way, why do I live?” (Gen. 25:22) The Lord says, “Two nations are in your womb,/and two peoples born of you shall be divided./The one shall be stronger than the other,/the elder shall serve the younger.” The firstborn twin is Esau, born red and covered with hair. “Afterward his brother came out with his hand gripping Esau’s heel: so he was named Jacob” (Gen. 25:26). His name means “usurper,” or “he supplants.” Esau grows up to be a hunter, while Jacob is “a quiet man, living in tents,” a herdsman. “Isaac loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.” Some elements of the story of Cain and Abel reappear in this episode, but the conflict and its resolution is more complex.

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The first adult encounter between the twins occurs when Jacob is cooking lentil stew (pottage), and Esau comes in famished and asks for some. “First sell me your birthright” (Gen. 25:31) Jacob replies. The birthright entitles the firstborn to leadership and an extra share of property. Esau’s response is “I am about to die; of what use is my birthright to me?” He agrees to the exchange and is given food. “Thus Esau despised his birthright.” The editor’s moral emphasis is not on Jacob’s venality but on Esau’s lack of commitment to his role as firstborn. Esau is not willing to die for his birthright, his name, and tribal identity. When Isaac is very old and almost blind, he summons Esau, asking him to prepare a savory stew from the game he hunts and bring it to him, so that he may bless Esau before he dies. Rebekah overhears and tells Jacob to bring her two kids from his flock so that she can prepare a dish for Isaac. She intends to fool Isaac into giving the blessing to Jacob. Her favorite son objects, pointing out that he is smooth-skinned and Esau is hairy. If the pretense is found out, it may bring a curse instead of a blessing. Rebekah replies, “Let the curse be on me, my son; only obey my word.” She clothes him in Esau’s garments and makes hairy gloves for Jacob’s hands. When all is ready, Jacob approaches Isaac: “My Father, Here I am”; “Who are you, my son?” Jacob replies, “I am Esau, your firstborn.” Isaac is suspicious because he thinks he recognizes Jacob’s voice, but he is taken in by the scent of the clothes and the feel of the gloves. He blesses Jacob: “Let peoples serve you and nations bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may your mother’s sons bow down to you” (Gen. 27:29). Esau arrives shortly after: “Who are you?” Isaac asks. “I am your firstborn son, Esau.” Then Isaac “shivers violently” and tells Esau he has given the blessing away and cannot retrieve it to bestow on him. Esau “cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry, and said to his Father, ‘Bless me, me also, Father!’” But the blessing has been given and cannot be recalled. Esau hates Jacob because of the deception and resolves to kill him as soon as Isaac is dead. Rebekah learns of this and tells Jacob to flee to her brother Laban for safety. Esau has married Canaanite women who “made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah.” She tells her husband that Jacob will go to marry a woman of their own blood, and so he sets out for Haran. It is clear in the leave-taking that Isaac is reconciled to the idea that the covenant with Abraham will flow through Jacob’s line, however the blessing was obtained. Rachel’s punishment for the deception is that she never again sees Jacob. The interchange can be seen as a parable of the “smooth” man, the crafty one, who wins out over his simpler brother. Some modern readers blame Rebekah for the trick played on Esau, but others point out that God

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had told her before the boys were born that the first son would serve the second, so her strategy was in support of the divine will. No matter how ill advised his decision, Esau did indeed trade his birthright for food. When he thought he faced death by starvation he succumbed. Underlying the moral equations of blame is a political/historical level. Esau is traditionally identified as the ancestor of the twelve tribes of Edomites, a despised Canaanite people at odds with Jacob’s descendants. Traditional readings of the text support Jacob, pointing to Ishmael’s faults and God’s mysterious choice of the second born. The prophecy to Rebekah, “Two nations are in your womb” is usually interpreted as a prediction of political rivalry. But rival siblings in myth often have an even broader import. Biblical writers would have known of the Egyptian twins, Osiris, representing creative order and fertility, and his dark counterpart, Set. Set murders Osiris, but his sister/wife, Isis, revives him and conceives his son, Horus, who struggles with Set and assumes his father’s throne. Although one figure is associated with dark and the other with light, Horus and Set are not simple representatives of good and bad, a binary pair. Set represents an inevitable side of experience: “Earth, matter, preservation, prosperity and longevity. He is a basis of life, yet he opposes change” (Norman 1969, 39). Horus is ascendant life, striving toward the heavens. The young god is a protohero, forbidden to kill Set, his shadow, though daily he slays Apopis, the blind serpent created by Set. Tension between Set and Horus creates the energy that drives the cycle of day and night, the passage of the seasons. In one legend, the two gods flank a great ladder up which Osiris, the dead and reborn savior, must ascend. He “climbs on the rungs of discord between Horus and Set” (Norman 1969, 43). The many pairs of sibling rivals in myth suggest a dialectic—consciousness rising from necessary darkness, form from fertile chaos. A mighty presence rises in history from the painful tension between Esau and Jacob. As we shall see, the images of light and darkness, mind and body, are eventually reconciled in the sons of Isaac.

J ACOB The night that Jacob leaves his father’s dwelling he dreams of a ladder stretching to heaven, with angels rising and descending. The Lord stands beside the dreamer saying, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham, your father, and the God of Isaac” (Gen. 28:12–17). He promises to give this land to Jacob and his descendants in much the same terms used in the

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covenant with Abraham. Jacob is afraid. “How awesome is this place!” He sets up a pillar, anoints it with oil, and calls the place “Beth-el,” house of God. He then makes a conditional vow: “If God will be with me . . . so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God.” Like the builders of the tower of Babel, Jacob wants a name so badly that he is willing to steal it away from his brother. But he sees the Lord clearly enough to be afraid. Jacob will earn his new name when his commitment is absolute. His flight from Esau marks the beginning of his formative journey. Arriving at the country of his uncle, Laban, Jacob sees a company of shepherds and their flocks gathered around a well. The well is blocked with a large stone so that no one may water the sheep until all the shepherds are present. The beautiful Rachel is tending her father’s sheep. “When Jacob saw Rachel . . . Jacob went up and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth and watered the flock . . . Then Jacob kissed Rachel and wept aloud” (Gen. 29:10–11). He can move mountains because he has glimpsed his beautiful bride, the motivating figure leading him to realize his final identity. Rachel’s father, Laban, welcomes his nephew and agrees that Jacob will work for him: Now Laban had two daughters; the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah’s eyes were lovely, and Rachel was graceful and beautiful. Jacob loved Rachel; so he said, “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.” (Gen. 28:20–21)

Jacob labored for seven years “and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.” Time is compressed in the fervor of his love. When the term was complete, Laban made a great wedding feast: “But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob; and he went in to her . . . When morning came, it was Leah!” (Gen. 29:22–25). Jacob, stunned by the deception, asks why Laban has done this. He replies that giving the younger daughter before the older is not the custom in his country. He offers to let Jacob wed Rachel immediately if he agrees to another seven years of service. Jacob agrees to the double marriage, but “he loved Rachel more than Leah.” The older sister, heavily veiled, substituted for Rachel, as Jacob won his brother’s blessing through his hairy clothing. The trickster and dealer in double identities has met his match in Laban.

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When both honeymoons are over, we learn that Rachel is barren. Leah, the unloved, bears the firstborn son, Reuben. Rachel and Leah each give Jacob their maids, both of whom bear sons. Only after Leah has born six sons does God “remember Rachel,” and she bears her firstborn, Joseph. The birth of the beloved son signals the emergence of the hero’s twiceborn soul. The wasteland is being overcome and the final goal, the promised land, is in sight. Jacob tells Laban he will return now to his father’s home. Laban is reluctant and puts obstacles in the way because he has prospered through Jacob’s efforts. The two men devise various strategies to win their ends, but at last, Laban agrees to let Jacob leave with all his flocks and servants. Just as Rebekah helped Jacob assume Esau’s identity, Rachel steals Laban’s household gods, assimilating the father’s power for her own offspring. As the caravan approaches Edom, Esau’s land, Jacob is fearful that his wronged brother may seek vengeance. He sends messengers ahead, promising many gifts if he finds favor in Esau’s eyes. When the messengers return, they tell him that his brother is advancing with four hundred armed men. Jacob is greatly afraid and divides the company into two parts, thinking that if Esau destroys one group, the other, containing his wives and sons, may be able to escape. From the point of view of prudence, Jacob would be better off returning to the security of Laban’s pastures. But, like Abraham, he is willing to endanger his dearest son to fulfill his mysterious destiny. When night falls, Jacob sends all of his party across the ford of the Jabbok River and remains behind (Gen. 32:23): Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hipsocket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So he said to him, “What is your name?” (Gen. 32:24–7)

It is clear as we read on that the mysterious man is a divine manifestation, like the angels who appeared to Abraham. The two wrestle till dawn, like twins in the womb, but the stranger cannot overcome Jacob’s tireless, wholehearted energy. He strikes him in the hip, leaving a mark of the agon. When Jacob tricked Isaac into giving him the blessing, Isaac could not see Jacob’s face because of his blindness. The stranger too wrestles in the dark, his face hidden. When Isaac asked Jacob for his name, he replied, “Esau, your first-born.” Here he responds to the stranger’s question with

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his own name, “Jacob.” His antagonist replies, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” The old name, “usurper,” is replaced by a name earned through struggle (“Israel” means “he who has been strong against God”). Jacob’s engagement with the stranger is an analogue for the heroic descent into the underworld and the dragon fight. As in Abraham’s first covenant encounter, “a deep, terrifying darkness” envelops the hero (Gen. 15:12). When facing danger from Esau, Jacob relies on gifts and strategies such as dividing the company. Here he throws himself into an unreserved, to-the-limit struggle resulting in a transformation of identity. Israel asks the stranger’s name, but his opponent does not reply. He blesses Israel and leaves. Jacob calls the place Peniel (the face of God), saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” God wrestles in the dark with his own image and his twin prevails. Jacob limps away at sunrise with a blessing and a new name, prepared to die, if need be, at the hands of his other twin, Esau. The wrestling scene is full of archaic and mysterious details—the supernatural being who must be gone before the first light, the injury that marks Jacob and causes him to limp, like Oedipus. The motif of the evenly matched antagonists is often portrayed in myth by conflict between twins or fathers and sons or look-alike strangers. Like all mythic events, the struggle represents an aspect of the process of growth, and if successful, leads to expanded awareness. Jung speaks of the “embrace of the shadow” as a critical stage in the hero’s passage to self-realization.(Aiaon 1951 CWiii, pars. 13–19) The preliminary struggles are with outside forces, sharply differentiated from the protagonist. The final test, however, requires that the projection of evil be withdrawn from exterior opponents and recognized as the dragon within. Strong egos resist recognizing their own limits. To embrace the shadow is to acknowledge one’s own mortality, flaws, and vulnerability. The painful recognition may be portrayed as a face-to-face encounter with death. If the agon can be sustained, the hero assimilates the powers, flawed though they be, of the many hidden, repressed aspects of the self. Jacob’s struggle with the stranger is his great test, comparable to Abraham’s call to sacrifice Isaac. In meeting the test, he reveals unflagging commitment even at the cost of sacrificing an aspect of himself. The death of the old man, Jacob, signifies the birth of Israel, the chosen people. When Jacob rejoins his family and sees Esau approaching with his army, he again divides the company, putting wives and children toward the rear, and Rachel and Joseph last. He himself marches alone before the rest. If

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death is to come, he will be the first to die. There can be no guarantee that Rachel’s firstborn, Joseph, will not be lost to Esau’s wrath, but Jacob must return to the Promised Land whatever the cost. When the brothers meet, Jacob bows to the ground seven times: “But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept” (Gen. 33:4). Jacob begs Esau to accept the lavish gifts he has offered. Esau wants to return them because he “has enough,” but Jacob says, “No, Please, if I find favor with you then accept my present from my hand; for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God” (Gen. 33:10). In the mirror of his forgiving brother, Jacob truly sees God’s face. The rivalry between the twins is now resolved, and the brothers see each other with eyes washed clear of jealousy. Myth ends with the reconciliation of opposites—what appears to be in conflict is revealed to be a unitary process, like breathing in and breathing out. Like Horus and Set, Jacob and Esau stand on either side of the ladder leading to heaven. And Israel ascends.

J OSEPH Genesis concludes with the story of Joseph (Gen. 37–50), a dramatic and detailed account of the initial constitution of the twelve tribes of Israel. Rachel has died, giving birth to Benjamin, Jacob’s twelfth son. Twelve signifies completion; there were twelve solar months and twelve gods in the Greek and Roman pantheons. Jacob loves Joseph more than his other children and gives him a “long robe with sleeves” (Hebrew) or a “coat of many colors” (Greek). Joseph dreams that the brothers are binding sheaves and his brothers’ sheaves bow down to his. In another dream, the sun and moon (father and mother) and eleven stars bow to him. Needless to say, the brothers hate Joseph. Like many nascent heroes, Joseph displays a certain careless sense of election. As Edward Edinger notes, he wraps himself in the glorious coat, identifying himself with a garment given to him, not earned (1986, 41). His inflated ego is a danger to him and he must be stripped of it. One day Jacob sends him to the fields to check up on his brothers, and as he approaches, they say, “Here comes the dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams” (Gen. 37:20). Reuben, the oldest brother, intervenes: “Shed no blood, throw him into this pit in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him.”

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He plans to rescue Joseph when the others are not looking. In verse 26, a variant version, it is Judah who intervenes, suggesting that they sell him into slavery instead of killing him. Joseph is stripped of his fine coat, thrown into the pit, and sold to a caravan of Ishmaelites, or Midianites, depending on the version. In any event, both groups are descended from rival clans, either Ishmael’s or Esau’s descendants. David Stein points out that Joseph is sold for twenty pieces of silver, the price of an adolescent slave. Thirty pieces is the price for an adult slave (8).The dreamer falls from the garden into the pit and is sold into Egypt, a nation rich in biblical significance. In its feminine aspect, it is lush, rich in grains and fruit, nurturing, luxurious. “Little Egypt” is a name for the body—sensuous, deeply appealing, and dangerous (Edinger 1986, 43). In Gnostic myth, Egypt is a symbol of ignorance, spiritual darkness. Pharaoh represents the masculine, aggressive spirit of Egypt’s imperial power. Egypt is luxury and slavery, cults of the dead, absolute power over life and death. When Reuben discovers that Joseph is gone, he tears his clothes in grief, then retrieves Joseph’s robe and soaks it in the blood of a goat. Parallels to the sacrifice of Isaac emerge with the substitution of the goat’s blood for the boy’s blood. The brothers take the coat to Israel, who is deceived as he deceived his own father with Esau’s stolen clothing. Jacob tears his robes and refuses to be comforted for the loss of his dearest son. As Regina Schwartz notes, the exchange of garments is a unifying symbol throughout the story of Joseph (1990, 40–60). Chapter 38 appears to be a digression but is thematically linked with Joseph’s story. Judah, Leah’s third son, marries a Canaanite woman and has three sons. He marries the first to a woman named Tamar, but the son is “wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death” (Gen. 38:7). The second, Onan, is required, by the law of Levirite marriage, to marry the widow and beget a male heir to perpetuate the line of the dead brother. “But since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his, he spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went in to his brother’s wife.” The Lord puts him to death too. Judah has one last son, Shelah, whom he should marry to the widow, but evidently he regards Tamar as bad luck and decides to shrug off his responsibility with a promise that Shelah will marry her later, when he is fully grown. As Abraham saw Isaac endangered, so now Judah sees a threat to his precious son, but, unlike the patriarch, he decides to protect the son instead of fulfilling his obligation. Time goes by, Judah’s wife dies, and Tamar realizes that she has been abandoned. When Judah passes through her village, she wraps herself in a shawl and sits by the side of the road,

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appearing to be a prostitute. Judah approaches and asks her price. He offers to give her a kid when he returns from his flock (again, the price for a son), but she demands a pledge, his signet and his staff, representing his identity or authority. As in the story of Joseph’s bloodied coat, personal items are exchanged as part of a deception. Later Judah tries to redeem the pledge, but she is gone. Three months late, in an exquisite irony, Judah is told that his daughter-in-law Tamar has “played the whore” and is with child. His immediate response, “Bring her out and let her be burned.” She sends him the signet and staff saying, “It was the owner of these who made me pregnant.” Judah admits his error: “She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her my son Shelah.” Tamar’s trickery, like Rachel’s interference with Isaac’s blessing, is shocking to modern readers but serves to advance the divine plan. Tamar bears a pair of fighting twins who replace Judah’s lost sons and carry his lineage forward. Perez, the first twin, is the forebear of King David. When we rejoin Joseph, the Ishmaelites have sold him to Potiphar, Pharaoh’s Captain of the Guard. The “Lord is with Joseph”; everything he touches turns to gold, and soon he is in charge of Potiphar’s household. “Now Joseph was handsome and good-looking” (Gen. 39:6). Potiphar’s wife notices him and asks him to “lie with her.” Joseph refuses, explaining that her husband trusts him with everything he has. He has not kept anything from Joseph except his wife. Joseph is determined to resist the forbidden fruit. The lady, however, is tenacious, and one day, when they are alone in the house, she seizes his garment and insists. He flees, leaving the clothing in her hands. She uses it to support false claims of attempted rape, charging that she rebuffed his advances and he fled, leaving the incriminating garments behind. Again, lies and stolen clothing point to transformations in identity and status. Joseph is thrown into jail. The Lord continues to show his steadfast love and Joseph is soon in charge of the prison. Shortly after, Pharaoh’s cupbearer and his baker fall from favor and are put in custody. They are troubled by dreams that they cannot decipher. Joseph asks to hear the dreams: “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (Gen. 40:8). The cupbearer describes three branches of ripe grapes, which he squeezes into the cup and hands to Pharaoh. In three days, Joseph tells him, Pharaoh will lift up your head” and restore you to your position. The luckless baker describes three baskets of cakes, devoured by wild birds. Joseph predicts: “Within three days Pharaoh will lift up your head—from you!—and hang you on a pole” where the

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birds will eat his flesh. His ability to interpret dream symbols indicates Joseph’s wisdom. Joseph’s predictions come true and two years later, when Pharaoh is troubled by dreams, the cupbearer remembers Joseph. The dreams show sleek cows rising from the Nile only to be devoured by seven lean cows. Seven full ears of grain are swallowed up by seven withered ears. Joseph shaves, changes his clothes, and appears before Pharaoh (Gen. 41:140). When asked if he can interpret the dreams, Joseph answers, “It is not I; God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer.” He tells the ruler that the dream predicts seven years of plenty to be followed by seven years of famine. Joseph urges that food be stored for use in the famine, and, in a moment of inspiration, Pharaoh picks Joseph to be in charge. In yet another exchange of garments, the ruler removes his signet ring from his finger: “Pharaoh put it on Joseph’s hand; he arrayed him in garments of fine linen, and put a gold chain around his neck.” He gives Joseph the Egyptian name Zaphenath-Paneah (“He Deciphers the Concealed”), and Joseph marries Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, priest of On. She bears him two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. Joseph is, in effect, Pharaoh’s son, holding authority over all of Egypt. The revelation of the hero as the King’s son ends this first part of Joseph’s journey. The famine comes as predicted, and when it is severe, Jacob/Israel hears that there is grain in Egypt and sends his ten eldest sons to buy supplies. He keeps Benjamin, Joseph’s brother, at home.4 The brothers must appear before Joseph to purchase grain, and they bow before him seven times, as in Joseph’s dream. They do not recognize him, and he treats them as strangers, using an interpreter so they will not be aware that he is overhearing them. He questions them about their family and displays his arbitrary powers by accusing them, without evidence, of spying. (He is spying on them, as he did when they lived at home, but accuses them of spying on Egypt.) He then puts them in prison saying he will not release them until Benjamin is brought before him. Joseph’s deception involves playing the role of the capricious tyrant. On the third day, he releases the brothers, keeping only Simeon as a hostage awaiting Benjamin’s appearance. Their three-day imprisonment is analogous to Joseph’s confinement in the pit. The brothers say: “Alas, we are paying the penalty for what we did to our brother; we saw his anguish when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen. This is why this anguish has come upon us” (Gen. 42:2). Reuben, who had attempted to intervene for Joseph, chides them: “Did I not tell you not to wrong the boy? But you would not listen. So now there

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comes a reckoning for his blood.” When Joseph hears this, he turns aside and weeps in secret. As the nine brothers are preparing to leave, Joseph orders his servant to return their money by hiding it in the bags of grain. On the way home, the brothers discover this deception and are terrified and puzzled. When Jacob learns of Simeon’s situation, and of the demand for Benjamin, he is in despair. “Joseph is no more, Simeon is no more, and now you would take Benjamin.” Reuben pledges the lives of his two sons if he fails to bring Benjamin and Simeon to safety, (another case of offering one’s child.) Jacob, unlike Abraham, will not chance losing his youngest child. Eventually, though, the stores run out and the clan must return to Egypt. Judah warns Jacob that there is no use going without Benjamin, and pleads: “Send the boy with me and let us be on our way, so that we may live and not die—you and we and all our little ones. I myself will be surety for him; you can hold me accountable for him.” Judah, in declaring his willingness to sacrifice himself for the tribes, sets off on his own hero quest. He recognizes his sin against Joseph and follows him on the same dark road to Egypt. At last, Jacob relents and the brothers, including Benjamin, set out with double the money and many treasures in addition. When they arrive in Egypt, they fear that Joseph plans to punish them because they did not pay for the first supply of grain. Instead, they are welcomed graciously, and when Joseph sees his brother Benjamin, he is overcome and must leave the room to conceal his tears. The next day grain is loaded into their eleven sacks, and again the money is secretly returned. David Stein (2003, 6) points out the money was returned first to nine brothers, then to eleven, adding up to twenty, the number of the pieces of silver the brothers received for selling Joseph. Joseph’s silver cup is hidden in Benjamin’s sack. He sends soldiers to overtake the Israelites and to charge them with theft. The brothers protest their innocence: “Let the one who has stolen be put to death and we will be your slaves.” The search begins with the eldest and ends with the revelation of the cup in Benjamin’s sack. All the brothers return to face Joseph, who tells them he will free the older men, but Benjamin must stay as his slave. Judah steps forward, saying that his father, Jacob, will die if Benjamin is lost: “His life is bound up in the boy’s life . . . Now therefore, please let your servant remain as a slave to my lord in place of the boy; and let the boy go back with his brothers” (Gen. 44:33). With Judah’s decision, the cycle of deception is replaced by full recognition. Now Judah understands slavery, in his own flesh, but he is willing to bear it himself to save Benjamin. He puts himself in his brother’s place and becomes his brother’s

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keeper. In doing so, he offers himself up as victim—not a lamb, nor a son, nor a brother, but himself, the true sacrifice. Judah’s sacrificial gesture strips away levels of self-interest and deceit, revealing his identity as a true son of Israel. Joseph’s deception ends too. He sends the servants away and bursts into tears: “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life” (Gen. 35:5). Joseph embraces his astonished brothers and assures them he will provide for them and Jacob by settling them in the Egyptian land of Goshen. As the brothers set out to bring their father to Joseph, he continues the theme of garments and identity, giving each of the ten brothers a “set of garments; but to Benjamin he gave three hundred pieces of silver and five sets of garments.” Three hundred pieces of silver is the price of redeeming ten adult slaves. Knowing them as he does, Joseph admonishes his brothers as they leave: “Do not quarrel along the way” (Gen. 47:24).5 In looking back at his sufferings, Joseph has a new perspective: “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Gen. 45:7–8). He integrates his suffering into a coherent vision of divine providence. The brothers did not understand what they had done to Joseph until they were themselves imprisoned in Egypt. In Rabbinic literature, forgiveness for sin occurs when the offender sees the offense from the point of view of the victim. Their suffering brings the brothers a changed perspective and earns them forgiveness. In the beginning of Joseph’s story, he is a dreamer, but his interpretive skills are rudimentary, geared to a world based on strife, egotism, and lies. He differentiates sharply between himself and all others, me and not-me, a simple binary distinction based on his urge toward dominance. Later, his vision expands to include larger issues, life and death in the case of the cupbearer and the baker, feast and famine in Egypt. While the issues are broad, they are still formulated in dualist terms—yes/no, good/bad. In his interaction with his brothers, however, Joseph shows himself to be “He Who Deciphers the Concealed.” The multiple images of disguise and revelation suggest a process of sifting through layers of illusion, passing through a hall of mirrors to achieve self-recognition and reunion with the father. Kenneth Burke (1937) describes the hero as moving from purpose to passion, to perception. Initially, the children of Israel are adrift in an ill-assorted world of competition and deceit. But events—Joseph’s exile, the famine . . . force them to adopt a purposeful stance. They undergo the passion, the overwhelming agon of struggle, and are changed

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by it. Perception expands as they reveal their true faces to one another, as Jacob and Esau do after Jacob wrestles with the stranger. When brothers recognize each other, it is like seeing the face of God. Joseph, the hero, reconciles the opposites in a new synthesis. This unitary vision, this revelation, is the goal of the mythic process. All the brothers are restored to the circle, and the Children of Israel begin their long journey in a brief, blessed moment of unity. They settle in Goshen, a rich area of the Nile delta. It is not the Promised Land, but it provides a haven in difficult times. When the tribes leave Egypt, they carry Joseph’s bones with them, back to Canaan.

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he Book of Exodus is a meditation on being, power and law in a fallen world. Pharaoh’s struggle with the Lord is presented in terms of illusion versus reality. Moses, myth-hero, confronts existential questions that continue to preoccupy modern and postmodern thinkers. Moderns do not speak of competing gods—true gods, false gods—because the dilemma has shifted from issues of true/false to a reassessment of language and meaning. As the development of language, representative thought, brought humanity to full consciousness, the failure of language in the twentieth century precipitated a crisis in our very conception of meaning. Wallace Stevens (1955), in The Necessary Angel, asks if the word “nobility” has sustainable meaning. Are concepts like equality, justice, liberation any more than verbal talismans in an absurd world? The conflict between Pharaoh and the Lord is an exploration of the relationship between power and levels of reality. Language systems are geared to power systems. In Exodus, Pharaoh is the palpable reality of empire and enslavement—the stone-carved status quo. Moses’ God represents the creative force that generates the transient, impossible beauty of realities springing from act. Nobility and justice exist only if they are realized through freely chosen actions. When Exodus begins, generations have come and gone and the tribes of Israel, following the first commandment of Genesis, have been fruitful and multiplied, becoming a powerful force in Egypt. The historical authenticity of the events described in Exodus are in dispute (Perhaps Moses’ Pharaoh is Rameses II (1299–1213 BCE) or perhaps not (see John Assman [1997] on Egyptian records purporting to describe Moses). As in Genesis, the biblical redactors have interwoven material from many

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periods and genres, combining them “in a way that values the preservation of divergent traditions more than a superficial consistency” (Coogan 2001, 82). A univocal reading is neither possible nor intended. In spite of textual complications and historical uncertainties, the basic narrative structure is clear. The first sixteen chapters focus on the rise of Moses and the struggle between Pharaoh and the God of the Israelites. Exodus concludes by focusing on the Law as an expansive image of revelation. Moses, the heroic catalyst, sees past Pharaoh’s limitations and sustains an unmediated vision of being—the face of God. Pharaoh believes himself to be the embodiment of Horus, who represents light and spirit, and Seth, “earth,” or “matter” (Norman 39). The enslaved Israelites are called the Hapiru or Hebrews, meaning “aliens, displaced, nomads.” The term may well cover immigrant groups besides the children of Israel. Because they are so numerous the Hebrews represent a threat to the stability of Egypt; Pharaoh assumes god-like powers over life and death, commanding that all male children born to them be drowned in the Nile. The autocratic power of the ruler transforms Egypt’s sacred river of life into the waters of death and chaos, like Noah’s deluge. When Moses is born, his mother places him in a little ark on the Nile to ride out the flood. Historical-critical readings see the Exodus account as a borrowing from the Akkadian epic (2550 BCE) of Sargon, who was born to a poor, single mother, placed in a basket woven of bulrushes, then set afloat on the Euphrates River. The baby is found by a humble farmer, but soon becomes the favorite of Ishtar, a powerful Sumerian goddess. Indeed, the Moses story is clearly dependent in many details on the earlier story (the ark, the river, the royal foster mother). Like the flood narratives in the Gilgamesh epic and the Atrahasis epic, the motif of the abandoned child is so universal that focusing on the tale’s historicity or cultural dissemination and local variations obscures the relationship of the tale of Moses to other biblical passages and to the universal structures of myth. The critical task is not to pile up more examples of the paradigm but to learn to read it intelligibly.1 The sacred child appears when the night is darkest and is hidden away in a cave or a basket, manger, or ark. Though threatened by a tyrannical father or king, the child escapes, usually with the assistance of clever helpers. Like Noah in his ark, Moses sails safely on the waters of chaos until the time is ripe for a new world to begin on God’s holy mountain. His sister, Miriam, arranges for him to be nursed by his own mother after Pharaoh’s daughter discovers and adopts the baby. Raised in the palace he appears to be a child of the house of Egypt and hence a supporter of the power structure, the status quo. But when the first test comes, Moses

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shows himself to be the nascent hero. As a young man, he sees an Egyptian beating one of his enslaved kinsmen: “He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Exod. 2:12). Having spilled Egyptian blood, Moses must now flee from Pharaoh’s wrath into the desert. It is, however, a fortunate fall for Moses. Just as Joseph was sold into Egypt and Jacob was forced to flee Esau’s wrath, Moses must retreat from the comforts of his boyhood to fulfill his destiny. He goes to the land of the Midianites and rests by a well. The seven daughters of the priest of Midian arrive to water their flocks but are driven away by other shepherds. In a reprise of the wife-by-the-well story, common to Isaac and Jacob, Moses rescues the women and marries Zipporah, who bears him two sons, Gershom and Eliezer. Moses’ years in anonymity as a shepherd end one day on Mt. Horeb (Sinai in other parts of the text.) An angel representing the Lord stands in a burning bush, but miraculously is not consumed by the flames (Exod. 3:2). Moses approaches and the Lord calls out, “Moses! Moses!” “Here I am,” he replies. God warns him to come no closer because he is on holy ground. The divine being announces himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Elohim, in Hebrew, a plural generic term for deity). Moses hides his face in terror, unable to sustain the overwhelming vision. Fire is symbolically associated with passion, desire, love. The vision foretells the fiery transformation Moses himself will undergo. The fire, which burns but does not consume, represents the hero’s mediational role. Like the wick of an oil lamp, the hero burns with an energy not his own, casting a light that attracts and terrifies at once. The fire is a transpersonal energy not to be “quenched by personal satisfaction” (Edinger 1986, 48). Moses stands at the combustion point where divine energy meets human consciousness, creating a brilliant and terrible beauty.2 At their first encounter, the Lord tells Moses that he plans to deliver the Hebrews from Egypt and bring them out to Canaan, “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exod. 3:8). He proposes to send Moses to lead them out of slavery. “Who am I,” Moses asks, “to bring them out of Egypt?” Moses’ question, the orphan’s question, “Who am I?” leads to God’s momentous self-naming: Moses asks: “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me ‘What is his name?’ ‘What shall I say to them?” God said to Moses “I AM WHO I AM” (Exod. 3:13–14). This name, in Hebrew, is Jahweh, spelled YHWH, based on the verb Hayah, “to be” or “to become.”3 God’s name is a verb—the ur-verb. He names himself “being,” the process underlying all reality. Nothing else,

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nothing less. Doubling the name, “I am . . . I Am” is an intensifier. By proposing himself as a verb, an action, Jahweh links being with act. What is, does. The world worlds, perennially generated like light by the burning wick at the center. For modern people, trained to a vision of reality as a predictable collection of discrete “things,” the conception of being as act is difficult to grasp. Einstein taught us that mass and energy “are the same basic stuff packaged in forms that make them appear different” (Brian Greene). As ice melts into water, then evaporates as steam, “mass is a frozen form of energy that can be converted into the more familiar energy of motion.” In our ordinary experience, the world of useful objects, the flux of life, is frozen as in stop-action photography, allowing things and persons to be grasped more clearly, used more freely. Conceptually, “real” things are tangible, clearly defined, atoms caroming like billiard balls in autonomous orbits. Lived-out realities, like liberation and courage, are ontologically dubious because they are fleeting and must be sustained by act, as light is sustained by the burning. In Exodus, Pharaoh, the rival god, represents being as thing rather than act. His stone idols and his hard heart are static, entrenched systems, entropic, sinking passively into decay. He has the power to take life but not to give it. Egypt’s gods are the codified residue of coercive power, rigid forms, resistant to motion, and thus lacking in the essential act of being. Jahweh is the point of contact between raw energy and inert mass. He is where it happens, the pattern, the equation, the code or word, the catalyst for the interplay of energy and mass constituting reality. Logos functions most effectively as a format for observing discrete objects in predictable motion. In the twentieth century, philosophical thought reached an impasse when logos seemed to be the only workable model for assessing truth claims. The German poet, George Hamann, stated the issue: Reason is language, logos. I gnaw at this marrow bone and will gnaw myself to death over it. There still remains a darkness, always over this depth for me: I am still waiting for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss. (in Heidegger 1971, 191)

For many, the choice seemed to be between logos and a suicidal option for the irrational. As language, our primary expressive mode, came under scrutiny, it became possible to situate the dilemma in language, rather than being. Martin Heidegger, for example, set out to destroy “metaphysics,” by which he meant a philosophically oriented logos. Being and Time (Sein

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und Zeit, 1927) concludes that being is not static, not a finished object or something added as a property to entities. Instead, reality or being is a kinetic, primordial event: “Alles ist Weg.” Human being is Dasein, being there, acting in the world, realizing the self in perpetual kinesis. Life is a temporal “not yet and no longer,” “Almosting it,” in James Joyce’s phrase (Sheehan 1987, 315). Although Heidegger’s effort to decenter or relativize logos was influential, he had no clear alternative model to propose. In the 1930s, Heidegger concluded that Being and Time, though correct in its rejection of fixed metaphysical ontology, was a product of the same will to power that produced metaphysics. He saw himself as “animated by the same selfassertive, aggressive . . . drive that powers the machines of modern technology no less than the machines of Cartesian rationalism” (Halliburton 1981, 203). In the 1940s, Heidegger began to explore mythos, poetic thought, and the mythic figure of the hero/poet as an avenue to kinetic reality. In doing so, he rejected the equation of intelligibility with logic in favor of a means to understanding based not on mental process but on act or deed. His 1946 essay, “What Are Poets For?” describes the modern era as a wasteland, “defined by the gods’ failure to arrive, by the ‘default of God.’” (Heidegger 1988b, 91) To heal the times, poet-heroes must venture into the abyss, there to “sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning” (91). Human failure, an egotistical distortion of will, is the source of the world’s winter night. Heidegger views this “self-assertion” as constitutive of modern man and his world; like Pharaoh, the ego forces “everything under its dominion from the start . . . The Earth and its atmosphere become raw material. Man becomes human material, which is disposed of with a view to proposed goals” (Halliburton 1981, 111). Heidegger describes the urge to objectify reality and deny change as part of a tactic to obscure the knowledge of one’s own mortality. In this process of mummification, reality loses a dimension of its being; the sharp edges of rationalism puncture the sac of reality and life’s kinetic dimension seeps away. The result is an unreal world—Pharaoh’s world. The price of knowing kinetic reality, Heidegger says, is “being toward death,” venturing into the abyss. When Jahweh, speaking from the burning bush, says, “I am who I am,” he does not mean the little I/Me/Mine of Ego, but the final apocalyptic self made visible only by heroic death and transformation. His name is an invitation to Moses to begin the labyrinthine work of self-realization. Moses is by no means ready at this stage of the narrative to accept the hero’s role. Like many other heroes, he shrinks back at first from the

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challenge. He protests that he is not the one to send because he lacks eloquence, is “slow of speech, slow of tongue” (Exod. 4:10). Though brought up in the court of Pharaoh, he is not proficient in the language of power. God promises help, offering to send Aaron, Moses’ brother, as spokesperson, but Moses begs off. “O my Lord, please send someone else.” As Richard Holloway notes, Moses’s impulsiveness and his footdragging are typical of archetypal heroes. They are often “marked by a hair-trigger temper and an internal feeling of personal inadequacy, compassion for suffering and a burning sense of justice” (2006, 32). After more dithering Moses at last sets off to Egypt with his wife and sons. A very strange passage follows, describing a nighttime struggle between God and Moses, in which Jahweh gives the reluctant hero a taste of death: On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the LORD met him [Moses] and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it, and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” So he let him alone. It was then she said, “a bridegroom of blood by circumcision.” (Exod. 4:24–26)

This puzzling episode is reminiscent of Jacob’s desperate encounter with the stranger who wrestles with him until the sun rises by the river Jabok. On the most literal level, readers can see the incident as a manifestation of God’s impatience with Moses’ foot-dragging. It may be an expression of divine anger that Moses and his sons and perhaps the Israelites generally have departed from Abraham’s covenant marked by circumcision. When Zipporah touches Moses’ feet (a euphemism for genitals) with the bloody foreskin, she is performing a ritual circumcision on her “bridegroom of blood.” The child’s blood atones for his father’s sins and the sins of the people. The struggle is immediately preceded by God’s prediction of the bloody outcome of Pharaoh’s hard-heartedness: Then you shall say to Pharaoh, “Thus says the Lord: Israel is my firstborn son.” I said to you, “Let my son go that he may worship me.” But you refused to let him go; now I will kill your firstborn son. (Exod. 4:21–22)

As we have seen in the stories of the patriarchs, the firstborn represents the true life-blood of the father, the treasure, the seed of the soul. That true life belongs only to God, like the lifeblood of sacrificial animals. It must be given freely to God. If it is withheld, it will be taken nevertheless.

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Moses tries to save himself by hanging back, but he is saved by the blood of the firstborn smeared on his body, as the Israelites are to be saved by the blood of the Passover lamb smeared on the lintels of the doors. In the next scene, Aaron and Moses go to Pharaoh: Thus says the LORD (Jahweh), the God of Israel, “Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness.” But Pharaoh said, “Who is the LORD, that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and I will not let Israel go.” (Exod. 5:1–2)

Pharaoh does not recognize Jahweh’s order of being, and he will not surrender the firstborn. When Moses persists, Pharaoh retaliates by refusing to provide straw for brick-making, increasing the difficulty of the slaves’ tasks. He is the quintessential slave-master; when Moses asks the tyrant to permit the slaves to worship, Pharaoh thinks first of lost work time. “Why are you taking the people away from their work? Get to your labors!” (Exod. 5:12) When the Hebrews complain of their hard treatment, Pharaoh exclaims, “You are lazy, lazy; that is why you say ‘Let us go and sacrifice to the LORD.’ Go now and work.” Pharaoh cannot be persuaded, so God initiates the ten plagues. In the first, Aaron’s staff strikes the Nile and its waters turn to blood. The sacred water of Egypt, its life source, once used to drown the sons of the Hebrews, has become a river of death, presaging the tenth bloody plague. What follows is an elaborate ritual of demands, denials, and punishments. In the ninth plague, Moses stretches out his hand and there is “darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt” (Exod. 10:21). Pharaoh at last capitulates, telling the Hebrews that they may go out to worship, taking their children with them. Moses, who does not plan to return from the desert, demands the livestock too. “But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he was unwilling to let them go.” To modern readers, the claim that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart presents an ethical dilemma. Sometimes the text says that Pharaoh hardens his own heart (Exod. 8:15, 32; 9:34). But God is emphatic about his own responsibility (Exod. 7:2, 9:12, 10:1, etc.). He explains that Pharaoh’s refusal gives him an opportunity to “show these signs of mine” (Exod. 10:2) so the Israelites can tell their children and grandchildren how their God saved them. All of Egypt must suffer for Pharaoh’s obstinacy, even though the Lord induces it. Understood literally, Pharaoh’s hardened heart re-introduces some of the issues raised by the story of the fall in the garden. How does evil occur if God is all powerful? What is the role of free will? How can a good God cause sin and then visit retribution?

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In fiction, evil characters, if drawn with sufficient complexity, are endowed with some measure of subjectivity so that we see them as full human beings and can sometimes pity them. But in other characters, like the Grand Inquisitor, the Nazi, the Klansman, human qualities are muted as the reader is led to focus on the depth and complexity of suffering caused by the faceless juggernaut that is the oppressive system. Pharaoh is insensible to the slavery, torture, bloodshed. Tyrants begin by hardening their hearts, but when violence becomes habitual, institutionalized, it also becomes obsessive, and in the end, tyrants are seized by forces they can no longer control. Isaiah, in a tirade against the rich who oppress widows and orphans, uses a similar phrase, indicating self-induced, systematic limitations: Keep listening, but do not comprehend; Keep looking, but do not understand. Make the mind of this people dull, Stop their ears, and shut their eyes. (Is. 6:9–10)

Pharaoh is blind because he chooses not to see. His hardness of heart is inevitable, a function of his role as slaveholder. It is inbuilt in the fixity of systemic injustice. Power may respond to sanctions, to resistance, to force but not to supplication and argument. Appeals to reason and compassion are fruitless. Pharaoh can be broken but not changed, even by God. Immediately after the ninth plague, darkness, symbolizing moral blindness, Pharaoh orders Moses out: “Get away from me! Take care that you do not see my face again, for on the day you see my face, you shall die!” (Exod. 10:28). Here Pharaoh associates his own face with the divine image; no one may see God’s face and live. Moses’ ironic reply reflects the punishment he foresees for this monstrous egotism. “Just as you say! I will never see your face again.” Pharaoh will die in pursuit of Moses and the Israelites.

PASSOVER The Lord tells Moses that the tenth plague will effect the deliverance of the Hebrews. Each family is to take a lamb, an unblemished male, and sacrifice it, rubbing the doorposts and lintels with the blood of the lamb. They are then to eat the lamb with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Their loins are to be girded, their sandals tied, their staffs ready, for their great journey is about to begin:

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It is the Passover of the LORD. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals; on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood I shall pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. (Exod. 12:11–13)

The Israelites do as commanded, and at midnight, the LORD strikes down all the Egyptian firstborn, “from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock” (Exod. 12:30). God takes back the life Pharaoh would withhold. The firstborn, the Hebrews, can never be slaves, objects of possession, but must be given over to the Lord. Pharaoh’s power is coercive, unfeeling violence, here represented by the institutionalized violence of slavery. The slave owner literalizes and usurps the divine role, engraving it in stone, believing that the people actually belong to him, as objects. Pharaoh represents blind power, demanding that individuals model themselves to accommodate the system as the price of saving their lives. The embryonic true self is threatened by the rising waters of violence. The Lord will rescue the Hebrews from this established oppression, but in return demands that the Israelites “consecrate to me all the firstborn” (Exod. 13:1). The children offered to him are images of self-sacrifice, to be redeemed through the ritual sacrifice of a lamb or doves. The mythic paradigm exemplifies a freely chosen commitment to lay down one’s life—one’s social identity, ego, common expectations and goals—and even, sometimes, a literal sacrifice of life—as the price of a more deeply developed identity. Those who model themselves on Pharaoh become brutalized, inert and stony like him. Moses’ life is a fire that does not consume his essence but intensifies it. Sacrifice represents the deep imperative to give one’s life back to its divine source as a way of coming finally to self-recognition. When Scyld Scefing, Beowulf’s predecessor, dies, his mournful people load his funeral ship with all the treasures he has brought them and send it racing across the night waters. They give him, their treasure, back to his source. At the instant in which Arthur’s sword Excalibur is returned to the waters, a shadowy barge appears on the horizon to carry Arthur to the Isle of Avalon where he will be healed of his mortal wounds. Life must be returned to its source. The tenth plague is not so much a simple display of God’s power over Pharaoh as it is an image of the difference between the transient power of the tyrant and the might of Jahweh, who is what is. A society that enslaves

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others pays with its dearest treasure. Oppressive power is ultimately destructive to those who wield it, and call it Mine. This is because violence begets violence, as the sorry course of history shows. It visits destruction on future generations. As Faulkner said, the past is not forgotten: “It is not even past.” The price of slavery is not simply lost soldiers and ruined lands, but loss of the oppressor’s soul, his firstborn. When Pharaoh attempts to hang on to the life of the Lord’s firstborn, he loses his own treasure and is compelled to send the Israelites away, with all their possessions. The Egyptians give them gold and silver to induce them to leave in a hurry. But Pharaoh has second thoughts, and his heart is again hardened. “What have we done, letting Israel leave our service?” As the tribes camp by the sea, they look back and see a vast army of chariots and soldiers in pursuit. They are terrified and cry out to Moses: Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? . . . It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness. (Exod. 14:11–12)

The episode is famous as a prototype of the lapses of faith noted so often by the prophets. Yet the people’s reaction shows a good deal of common sense. When, in their experience, has Pharaoh ever lost out to a group of slaves? They are terrified of liberation, unprepared for miracles, suspicious of heroism. Just as Moses played the reluctant hero at first, the people now yearn after familiar patterns. The sea by which they are camped, yam suf in Hebrew, is usually translated as the Red Sea or Reed Sea, but the literal translation of yam suf is the “Sea of End” or “Extinction” (Harris 2000, 125). Jahweh saves his people from extinction by dividing the sea, sending a strong wind (ruach, wind or spirit) to drive it back. As in Genesis, God’s spirit broods on the waters of chaos and divides them to begin a new creation. A few biblical texts refer to an old tradition describing a battle between God and Rahab, a water dragon (Harris 2000, 125). In Psalm 89:9, Jahweh “crushes Rahab like a carcass.” Isaiah describes the Lord piercing the dragon, cutting Rahab in half (Is. 51:9; see also Job 9:13, 26:12). Sometimes Egypt is called Rahab (Ps. 87:4). In Middle Eastern myths, such as the Babylonian epic of Marduk, the Enuma Elish, warrior gods regularly slay dragons. Marduk cuts Tiamat in half and makes the world from her body (see Batto 1992). Horus, the Egyptian god, overcomes Apopis, the blind serpent. Zeus defeats the monster Typhon. Jahweh, as warrior God, saves his people by destroying the dragon Pharaoh:

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“The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left” (Exod. 14:22). When they have passed through, Moses extends his hand again, the waters rush back and Pharaoh and all his chariots are swept away. “So the people feared the Lord and believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.” The first section of Exodus tells “the story of freedom from slavery, while chapters 16–40 tell the story of freedom: liberation from slavery is followed by liberation to accomplish a new thing” (Coogan 2001,83). The sojourn in the wilderness is, in part, the hero’s passage through the wasteland, but it is also a time of joyous transformation. “Thus says the Lord, I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you / Followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown” (Jer. 2:3). Ranen Omer-Sherman’s study of desert imagery in Jewish writing speaks of the voice of God “in the archaic purity, the timeless flight, of the desert experience” (2006, 17). Like their ancestor Abraham who left Ur to roam in the wilderness, the Hebrews leave their “bodily immersion in clay, straw, mortar and bricks” for the “transcendent space” of the wilderness where they encounter their God (15). “Between the place and the world lies the non-place, the desert, wherefrom the voice comes and where the book is given” (Zali Gurevitch, in Omer-Sherman 2006, 3). “Human identity, as a whole, owes more to its desert experience than to its dreams of Eden” (Omer-Sherman 2006, xiv). “Wilderness is a necessary condition for every revelation, for every internalization of the Torah’s teaching: ‘Whoever would wish to acquire Torah, must make himself ownerless like the wilderness’.” (Midrash Rabba in Omer-Sherman 2006, ix). Mircea Eliade speaks of the “nostalgia for Paradise.” The dominant theme of the thought “of all archaic peoples is the drive to abolish history—all of history—and return to that point beyond time when the world began. The desire to go back to the beginnings [Eliade] argues, is the deepest longing, the most insistent and heartfelt ache in the soul of all archaic people” (Pals 1996, 179). History, in all power-based societies, is the record of triumphant emperors; ritual worship involves prehistory, “a re-enactment of what the gods did in illo tempore (‘In that time’) at the moment when the world came into being” (Pals 1996, 179). It has been said that the Israelites chose to break the cycle, to seize history, proclaiming God as the Lord of history. Other gods exist in myth-time, “once upon a time”; Jahweh offers an alternative to wasteland/history but does not simply lead the way back to the primal garden. The journey through the desert leads to the Promised Land—a new place, a garden to be achieved by action, by following the Law to love God and one’s fellows. In the ancient world, only the demigods and princes played the heroic

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role. In Exodus, the entire people are called to set out on a journey through the Wasteland. For forty years, the Israelites wander in the desert, guided by Moses and the Law, enjoying a return to the simplicity of nomadic tribal life. They may not go back to the innocence of Paradise but are called on to build Jerusalem, the antithesis of empire. God’s “glory” leads the Israelites on their pilgrimage as a bright cloud during the day, a pillar of fire by night. The path leads to a “land flowing with milk and honey,” (Exod. 3:8). Just as no animal lives were taken for food in the Garden, so in the new dispensation, people live in sweetness and innocence. Manna rains down from heaven (“It was like a coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey”; Exod. 16:31). All have enough, but must not gather more than they can eat in a day. Their daily bread is free for the taking. In the wilderness, they escape the imperial wasteland, treading an upward spiral toward the city of God. The heroic path is difficult, however, and the people often hearken back to the security of slavery: “If only we had died by the hand of the Jahweh in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots” (Exod. 16:3). In spite of their grumbling, the Lord provides. When there is no water, Moses strikes the rock and sweet water gushes forth. When attacked by Canaanites, they are victorious. After three months, they arrive at Mt. Sinai (or Horeb) to worship God and form a covenant: The LORD says: You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you up on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. (Exod. 19:4–6)

For three days, Moses prepares them for the moment when God will come down on Mt. Sinai in the sight of all. When the moment comes, the mountain is rocked with thunder and lightning, earthquakes, flames and the sounding of a loud trumpet. The people tremble with fear and ask Moses to be their interlocutor. “Do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” The divine presence overwhelms everyone except Moses who relays the “ten words,” the Decalogue, to the people (Exod. 20:1–17). The Torah or Law is a compendium of many strands of legal codes developed over history and reflecting complex cultural development. They are included in Exodus, repeated in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, and traditionally attributed to Moses (see Harris 2000, 128–29; see also Crusemann 1996 and Mendenhall 1955). The Ten Commandments, the core of

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the Torah, are numbered differently in various traditions, but they fall into three parts. The first has to do with worship; the second group (Honor thy father and thy mother, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal or bear false witness) lays out the framework for behavior essential to stable community life. The last injunctions (Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife) are more internalized, forbidding desire. Do not even want things that belong to others. Rest content. Both laws and gods are associated with power. Not all gods are concerned with love or justice, or spiritual wisdom, but worship is always, on some level, an acknowledgment of power. When the Israelites agree in the covenant to abide by the law, they exchange the impositions of Pharaoh’s tyrannical power for a freely chosen code—a governance by law rather than by powerful masters, binding on rich and poor alike. Once entered into covenant, the Israelites are liberated “from the incestuous ties to blood and soil, from the submission to idols, from slavery, from powerful masters, to freedom for the individual, for the nation and for all of mankind” (Fromm 1966, 9).The ethical principles of the Law and the prohibitions against violence and theft are widely shared in the ancient world. From a pragmatic point of view, the commandments are prudent rather than arbitrary. As Richard Holloway observes, “radically unequal societies are less happy, less healthy and much more violent and turbulent than those who care for weaker members” (2006, 43). The chief difference between the Mosaic law and such legal systems as the code of Hammurabi (1700 BCE) lies less in the specific enjoinders and prohibitions than in its realignment of the power of law, the realignment of will of those voluntarily committed to it. The first commandments, concerning monotheism, are unique to the biblical religions. The first of the ten “words” is “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2). Coupled with this command is the rejection of idol worship. “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” The ban on iconic representation of God, was interpreted by other ancient cultures as a “counter-religion,” bordering on atheism (Assman 1997, 39). On a literal level, the ban against representation reads as a rejection of religious art, statues, and pictures. In its broadest sense, it is a rejection of the literalism of pagan worship, which conflates the power of the gods and the rulers. The following injunction against “making wrongful use of the name of the Lord” is not so much about perjury and idle cursing and swearing as is about the effort of secular powers to clothe themselves in the divine name to achieve their own ends.

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Pharaoh, the idol of the Book of Exodus, represents the hard heart of the entrenched power system, graven in stone, a changeless peremptory demand for obeisance. To accede, from fear or greed, is indeed idol worship. As the basis of monotheism, the First Commandment requires that the worshipper be one—focused, integrated—just as God is one (Edinger 1986). Polytheism is the worship of separate aspects of the divine being. It is motivated by the scattered fears and cravings of the unfocused self. The First Commandment is a call to higher levels of internal alignment and self-control—the reconciliation of disparate vectors of energy. The last of the commandments concerning worship establishes the Sabbath Day, a time of withdrawal from the secular necessities of work. Edward Edinger calls the Sabbath “a temporal ark,” God’s place in time. Not a temple, but a holy time set aside for holy work. Other gods, like Marduk of the Enuma Elish, end their world-creation by building temples for themselves. Marduk calls his palace-shrine Esagila, a “resting place” for the gods (Geller 1989, 73). In Genesis, Yahweh concludes by creating the Sabbath, a resting place for his people. The first group of commandments establishes God’s centrality and also his boundless, unimaginable energy. Every effort to contain, localize, or literalize God is self-defeating. And yet, for all God’s otherness, scripture insists on the primacy of the human bond with God. In Exodus, the Law is the Way, the manner of knowing and loving the divine. When the Lord forbids idols (Exod. 20:23–26) he forbids monumental altars of gold and silver, asking instead for an altar of earth to be used for ritual sacrifice. “But if you make for me an altar of stone do not build it of hewn stones; for if you use a chisel on it you profane it.” A parallel exists here with the construction of the tower of Babel, when the people tried to build a sacred mountain reaching to heaven. Such mountains cannot be made by hewing stone. In Exodus 25 and following, God describes the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle or Tent of Meeting that will be his home. The Ark is a box to hold the tablets of the Law. It is covered with gold and carried by two long poles. Carvings of cherubim adorn the top of the Ark, forming the mercy seat, or cover. The Ark is a desert ship for the living God, the moving site of the unseen God traveling the wilderness with his people. The tabernacle is a portable tent, never to be tied down to a single place. The proportions of the Ark are significant in that they are related to the Greek “Golden Mean,” a mystical proportion indicating the bringing together of opposites (Edinger 1986, 55–57). The worship of Jahweh does not require statues or temples, for God cannot be localized but moves outside of fixed places and beyond representation. As Jahweh’s name suggests, he is a constantly active presence,

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past all formulation. His name (identity) may not be used for any purpose of power. Everything about God is holy, meaning “set aside” from common use. Deuteronomy 4:12 emphasizes God’s ineffability: The Lord spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of words but perceived no shape—nothing but a voice . . . Take care, then, not to forget the covenant . . . and not to make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness, against which the Lord your God has enjoined you. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, an impassioned God. (New Jewish Publication Society translation)

Before the establishment of cities, there was no law. Tribal customs, the ways of the people, required no mechanism for formal enunciation of rules. Such infractions as murder and theft, mentioned in the commandments, were contained by social pressures. The immediate responses of kinfolk, fear of disgrace, ostracism, and revenge permitted a social balance independent of legal codes. Group survival requires individuals to love their neighbors as themselves. The caste systems common in urban cultures atomize the population and substitute power structures for communal love. Law, at its best, is a surrogate for love. Exodus borrows freely from ancient legal documents such as the code of Hammurabi. The lex talionis, for example, puts limits on retaliation. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (Exod. 21:23) calls for proportionality in response to attacks. The Law formulates the command to love one’s neighbors. As Marcus J. Borg observes, “Justice is the social form of love” (2003, 76). In the book of Deuteronomy, a retelling and interpretation of the Law, the recitation of the Decalogue is followed by the “Shema,” “Hear, O Israel,” one of the most sacred prayers of the Jewish tradition: Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (Deut. 6:4–5)

The great law is to love God with all one’s focused strength. The correlative of the great commandment is expressed in Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Keeping the first commandment permits the detachment, the disinterested love of others essential to a just society. The Mosaic covenant, freely accepted, applicable to all members of the society, shifts the basis of the social order away from the power structures of empire to acts of will, both personal and communal. In doing this, the

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Law allows for a radical redefinition of the individual. In the new dispensation, our choices define us, not the accidents of birth. In leaving Egypt and committing to the Law, the Israelites begin the heroic process of creating a just society, a fragile reality spun from their own freely given allegiance rather than entrenched power. Shortly after the Israelites receive the commandments, Moses leaves them to ascend the holy mountain again. The people lose focus; “running wild” (Exod. 32:25) they demand an idol to worship. Under Aaron’s direction, they contribute all their jewelry (taken from the Egyptians) to form into a golden calf, a symbol of fertility, power, and wealth. They are a “stiff-necked” people (Exod. 32:9), all too quick to revert to Pharaoh’s values. The result is terrible violence. Moses sees the idolatry and destroys the tablets of the Law. The tribe of Levi, Moses’ tribe, under his orders, picks up the sword, going from tent to tent; he orders “each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor” (Exod. 32:26–30). In refusing the Law, the Israelites implicitly refuse to love their own people. Exodus projects the source of their punishment onto God, as a product of his wrath, but their fate is a terrifying image of the results of regression into a society built on uncaring power and riches. The Levites, who carry out the Lord’s will with unflinching concentration, win consecration to priestly service. There is a hint at the transformative power of sacrifice in the grim observation that the priesthood was gained “each one at the cost of a son or a brother” (Exod. 32:28). Moses internalizes the Law and speaks with God “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exod. 33:11), yet even he is not equal to a full revelation of being. After the episode with the golden calf, Moses says, “Show me your glory, I pray” (Exod. 33:8). God replies that all his goodness will pass before Moses, “But, he said, you cannot see my face: for no one shall see me and live” (Exod. 33:20). God conceals Moses in the cleft of a rock and covers him with his hand while the divine glory passes by. Glory is an infinity of linked analogies, the simultaneous vision of the archetypes in their endless manifestations. It is portrayed as a light emanating like a fiery halo of meaning from the divine presence. When the theophany is over, the Lord commands Moses to rewrite the Law on new stone tablets, describing himself as a God of Love: The LORD, the LORD, A God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation. (Exod. 34:6–7)

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When Moses comes down from the mountaintop, his face is afire with the divine glory of the burning bush. He must wear a veil to protect the people from this reflected fire. The Law, written again on stone, is the highest manifestation of glory the people can endure. Like most things of importance, law and virtue, crime and punishment, assume a variety of meanings viewed from various perspectives. Laws are endowed with powers of different kinds. Some people’s experience and conditioning endow the law with extrinsic power. It comes from on high, an arbitrary decree promulgated by a warrior god or a tyrant prince. Disobedience is wrong and merits punishment because it is a transgression of the commandment. This view requires little reflection and is typical of societies driven by powerful elite groups. More intrinsic views of law emerge when the governed assent to the laws as structural element in an orderly social flow. From this perspective, laws forbid certain activities because they are damaging to others and to the self. Benjamin Franklin put it this way: “Certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden, or good because [scripture] commanded them: Yet probably those actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial” (Morgan 2003, 134). Penalties too are intrinsic since we are punished by our sins, not for them. Laws of action and reaction govern the moral sphere as well as the physical. Freud spoke of the “repetition compulsion,” the habit of mistreating others in the ways we have been mistreated. Injustices cause widening circles of pain, eventually affecting everyone in the society. On a personal level, hatred addressed against “the enemy” inevitably rebounds in self-destructive violence. We treat ourselves as we treat others. Good actions likewise enhance the doer. “Every act rewards itself,” says Emerson (“Compensation” 1950, 361). The two great commandments, to love God with your whole heart and to love your neighbor as yourself, are so strongly intrinsic as to be statements of what inevitably is. Like the law of gravity, which says water must flow downhill, the command to love is not so much an exhortation or rule as it is a description of human relationships. Self-destructive people, those who love themselves little, treat their neighbors as they treat themselves. David Halliburton points out the sad correlative that for many people, the golden rule means, “Do to yourself what others have done to you.” Loving people extend love to others in proportion to the levels of their own self-acceptance and security. In medieval analysis, fear and desire are the forces pulling the will from its clear path to the divine center. In modern psychological terms, we observe obsessive/compulsive behaviors driven by fear, anger, and the

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need to achieve security by seizing control. Greed, wife-beating, arrogance, all are compulsive behaviors fueled by the need to protect the fragile ego. Impulsive disorders, however, are based on desire and the urge for instant gratification. People who act on impulse are typically appetitive, often bored, with a low level of engagement. Eating disorders, addictions, gambling, and promiscuity are typical products of impulsive desire. Both syndromes manifest themselves in a wide range of related areas. One man may rob a bank because he is bored; another may embezzle from a bank because of acquisitive urges. Though both thieves think of themselves as having freely chosen their courses of action, neither is free of the powerful forces of fear and desire driving them to self-destruction. The objects of misguided passions become idols, demanding sacrifice, conforming the life of the sinner to the service of an insatiable god. The inner Pharaoh requires self-induced slavery, precluding genuine self-knowledge in favor of the delusional goals of obsessive behavior. Pride—hubris or egotism—although not clearly associated with any of the commandments, is widely regarded as the most serious sin. Many great figures in myth have turned aside from the heroic path, refusing to answer the call because of egotism: “The myths and folktales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest” (Campbell 1968, 59–60). The ego refuses to change, clinging to the “present system of ideals, virtues, goals and advantages,” as if they were forever secure. In the legends of Lucifer, the mighty angel rejects God’s sovereignty when he hears that angels will worship the Christ Child. Lucifer exclaims “Non serviam!” I will not serve. He sees the prophecy as a command, arbitrary and extrinsic to his own nature, so he refuses it, hoping to maintain his own high status. He makes himself a god, like Pharaoh, changeless and unfeeling. “The divinity itself became his terror; for obviously, if one is oneself one’s god, then God himself [Jahweh], the will of God, the power that would destroy one’s egocentric system, becomes a monster” (Campbell 60). Genuine freedom is possible only through heroic detachment from fear and desire, achieved through complete commitment to the divine center. In describing virtue, Aristotle said, “Moral virtue is a mean. It is a mean between two vices, one involving excess, the other deficiency” (Nicomathean Ethics, 1109, in Edinger 1986 56). Virtue is no compromise or a halfway measure but a feat of supreme balance. In describing the golden mean, Aristotle warned: “It is no easy task to be good, for in everything it is no easy task to find the middle, e.g. to find the middle of a circle is not for everyone, but for him who knows” (Edinger 56).

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Love of God is a movement toward the center. Martin Heidegger calls the kinesis of love “the draft.” He uses a metaphor, derived from a series of poems by Rainer Marie Rilke,4 in which a gravitational force, “the unheard of center,” holds all in balance, lending weight, and direction to all things. Rilke uses the word Bezug or draft to suggest a pure and powerful flow of energy, a wind, a pull, a draw, intangible but sustaining and indeed defining. Heidegger says that “Given beings, of one sort or another, are according to the attraction by which they are held within the pull of the whole draft” (Heidegger 1946, 106). The “great accustomed things,” the animals and plants, have entered simply and wholly into the pure draft, “the Open.” Heidegger sometimes compares the play of the forces of the universe to an Ereignis, or ringdance in which the partners move in harmonious celebration of betrothal. The unqualified presence of the being of simple things is expressed in a line Heidegger quotes from the poet Angelus Silesius: “The rose is without a why: It blooms because it blooms” (1988, 107). Humanity, however, “stands over against the world.” While other living things are purely in the draft, moving smoothly toward the goal, human ego stands outside, observing, judging and settling for a “view” or representation rather than wholehearted participation. In rabbinic tradition, Seraphim, the highest angels, are aflame with love as they sing “Holy, Holy, Holy.” “But according to some writings, they can sing only the first “Holy” before the intensity of their love ignites them again and dissolves them again, perpetually into flames” (Dillard 1982, 280). On their six beating wings, the Seraphim hover giddy over galaxies and atoms that nest and telescope in vertiginous glory across all dimensions of time and space, their faces, like Moses’, aflame and veiled from the world. In the sublunar sphere, virtuous people strive to hold themselves steadily aligned with the draft. Heart, soul, and strength are capacities for action attuned to the energies driving the stars in their paths. Interior life is a balance, an orbit shaped by the gravitational force of love and the centrifugal momentum of fear and desire. Each soul finds its own elliptical path, balanced among other cycling orbs, part of a vast, unseen matrix of motion. Saints and children and prophets are dancing partners, knowing God the way they know songs. Souls can no more escape the love of God than planets can escape the gravitational force of the sun and stars. Some plunge from orbit—blazing, Luciferian comets in the dark. Others leap into the sun, on fire, but not consumed.

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iblical histories and the books of the prophets continue the theme of the struggle between Jahweh’s Law and the tyrannical powers of the state. Samuel’s account of the rise of the Israelite kingship is unsparing in its analysis of the monarchy, and the prophetic books record many disastrous distortions of royal power. As Stephen L. Harris points out, Mesopotamian histories routinely describe rulers as “descended from heaven” (2000, 168–70). Like Pharaoh, they are God-men, representing power far above criticism. New Historicism points out that supposedly objective modern accounts of power struggles are inevitably skewed in favor of the interests of the dominant forces (winners write histories). Biblical histories and prophetic accounts vary from the norm in being severe in judging the royal ambitions of their leaders. Their candor and willingness to criticize the secular powers set them apart from the court histories of the ancient world. Samuel’s narrative of David’s rise to kingship reflects the biblical ambiguity toward institutional power. It is unflinching in its critique of David’s tactics, guile, and mixed motives, even as it details the formation of the covenant establishing a special relationship with David’s royal line. As we watch, David, the prototypical king and beloved son, is transformed by power into his antithesis, a tyrant. The Book of Judges describes early tribal life in Canaan as a maelstrom of warlords and ethnic violence. Nevertheless, on some level, the period of the Judges represents an extension of the liminal state, the Exodus sojourn in the desert. Standard forms of kingly power are absent, but when a crisis develops, charismatic, ad hoc leaders, the Judges, like Samson, Deborah, or Gideon, rise to the situation. Samuel, an archetypal hero, is a prophet and the last of the Judges. At his birth, his hitherto barren mother exults:

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“The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength” (1 Sam. 2:4). Her canticle celebrating God’s preference for humble people introduces the contrast between princely power and prophetic denunciations informing the biblical account of the monarchy. Under Samuel, the tribes enjoy a generation of military success and prosperity in faithful conformation to the Law. Samuel hopes his sons will succeed him, but they are corrupt, unworthy to lead. The elders urge Samuel to anoint a king for them so that they can be “like other nations” (1 Sam. 8:15). The prophet is displeased; the Lord puts this option for conformity in perspective: “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them./Just as they have done to me from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day” (1 Sam. 8:7–8). The Lord appears disappointed but stoic at the rejection of his plans. He tells Samuel to warn the people what their king will do to them: “He will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots . . . He will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties to plow his grounds and reap his harvest and make his implements of war” (1 Sam. 8:11–12). In this new order, the daughters will be perfumers, cooks, and bakers in service to the powerful. Taxes on the poor will be high and the king’s courtiers will get the best fields, vineyards, and olive groves. In short, the Lord says: “You shall be his slaves” (1 Sam. 8:17; see also 10:17–27 and 12:1–25) The people refuse to listen: “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations.” God selects Saul as the first anointed one, mashiah (messiah), to be Israel’s king. Though described as strong and handsome, stock descriptions of biblical heroes, Saul is doomed. The compelling scenes of his fall into madness, his jealousy of David and his disastrous military stratagems are the main content of the first book of Samuel. As Saul declines, David’s star rises. We see David first as a boy in a pastoral setting. The Lord orders Samuel to replace Saul with one of the sons of Jesse, a descendant of Judah living in Bethlehem. Samuel’s initial choice is Eliab, the handsome firstborn: “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature because I have rejected him: For the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance but the Lord looks on the Heart’” (1 Sam. 16:7). As in the confrontation with Pharaoh, the Lord sees reality from a different vantage point. Jesse sends seven sons before Samuel—the seventh should, by the rules of myth, be the One— but the Lord is not satisfied. Samuel asks if there is another son. The youngest, Jesse says, is tending the sheep. When David is brought in he is “ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome.” Samuel anoints him

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and “the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.” His name means “beloved,” and his role is to be the perpetual king of Israel. The handsome boy plays his lyre to soothe Saul’s fits of madness and he bonds with the King’s son, Jonathan, who gives David his armor, signifying his own willing displacement as royal heir. For a time, Saul loves David, accepting him as a son. At this point in the hero myth, David is making the transition from unknown outsider to prince of royal blood. When Samuel anoints David he promises a further transition, a divine paternity for his offspring, Solomon. God will be a father to him, and his “throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam. 7:12–16). The famous victory over Goliath emphasizes the power of the Lord, employing a humble shepherd boy against the violence of empire. At first, Saul dresses David for the contest in his own armor, but it is so heavy that David cannot walk in it. He rejects the conventional trappings and relies on his sling, five smooth stones and God’s blessing. He challenges Goliath: “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of Hosts” (1 Sam. 17: 45). Inevitably, Saul becomes jealous of David’s successes and tries to eliminate him. David becomes an outlaw, a sometime ally of the Philistines, but he passes up the opportunities he has to kill Saul because of his respect for the anointed one. When Saul is killed in battle, David becomes King of Judah, his own tribe, and after much strife, assumes the kingship of the confederacy of the twelve tribes. His highest moment is his capture of Jerusalem from the Jebusites and his establishment of a court there, as well as a shrine housing the Ark of the Covenant. When David has settled into his palace, he offers to build a temple, a splendid house for the Lord. Speaking through the prophet Nathan, the Lord declines: “Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt” (2 Sam. 7:5–6). Jahweh refuses to be domesticated, institutionalized, confined within the narrow measures of human recognition. Instead of allowing the King to build him a house, he will build the House of David, an everlasting dynasty. David’s initial innocence is lost in a muddle of conflicting aims, stemming in part from his growing ambition. The incident with Bathsheba and her husband, Uriah, epitomizes the tangled web of power tightening around David’s throne. As the story opens (2 Sam. 11) it is the “spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle.” But this year David stays at home in the palace, sending his commander, Joab, to “ravage the Ammonites.” Late one afternoon, as the King rises at last from his luxurious bed, he looks from the rooftops and spies a beautiful woman engaged in ritual bathing. He sends agents to inquire about Bathsheba and learns

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that she is the wife of Uriah, a Hittite mercenary and a distinguished soldier under Joab’s command. “So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her” (2 Sam. 11:4). The image of the king looking down on the private lives of others, unable to deny himself anything, suggests the corrupting influence of power. When Bathsheba becomes pregnant, David tries a cover-up, summoning her husband home from the battlefield so that he will sleep with his wife and accept David’s child as his own. In spite of David’s repeated efforts to get Uriah to go to Bathsheba, the soldier will not do it because it breaks the codes of honorable warfare. “The Ark and Israel remain in booths . . . camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do such a thing” (2 Sam. 11:11). Uriah’s self-control and loyalty to the Ark present a contrast to David’s self-indulgence and deceit. When the king realizes that he cannot shift the responsibility to Uriah by his ruse, he writes to Joab, ordering him to send Uriah into “the forefront of the hardest fighting and then draw back from him.” He is so sure of Uriah’s integrity that he asks him to carry his own death warrant to Joab. The commander does as he is told, and a number of Israelite soldiers, including Uriah, are killed when ordered to advance too close to the city walls. Joab sends David a messenger to describe the engagement; if the king is angry and questions the faulty tactics, the messenger is to say, “Your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead too” (2 Sam. 11:21). All goes as the commander anticipates; David angrily asks why the troops were sent so close to the wall, but when he hears that Uriah is dead, he is immediately appeased and tells the messenger not to worry about the loss of life in war, “for the sword devours now one and now another.” As soon as Bathsheba’s mourning is finished, David marries her and brings her into the harem. Violence, plots, spies, cover-ups—the usual trappings of unbridled power—appear to have won out. “In any kingdom other than . . . Israel, the matter would have ended there; the monarch would have satisfied his lust and no one would have dared to protest” (Harris 2000, 167). But the Lord confronts Pharaoh, even if he finds him on the throne of Israel. The prophet Nathan comes to David with a parable about a rich man and a poor man (2 Sam. 12: 1–7). One has many flocks, the other only a single ewe lamb, treasured as if it were his own daughter. When the rich man must entertain a guest, he takes the poor man’s only lamb and prepares it as a meal. At the end of his parable, Nathan turns to David for a reaction; the king is outraged at the pitiless act and exclaims that the rich man

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deserves to die. “You are the man!” says Nathan. The discovery scene is reminiscent of Judah’s self-recognition when Tamar presents his seal and staff as evidence of paternity. It is also like that between Oedipus and Tiresias when the prophet describes the source of the cursed plague troubling Thebes. Tyrant kings do not recognize themselves in parables and so must pay a terrible price for self-knowledge. Because he has “despised the way of the Lord,” Nathan tells David that “the sword shall never depart” from his house. Because David, unlike Pharaoh, recognizes his guilt, he is spared death, but Bathsheba’s infant son will die in his place. As we have noted, the death of the firstborn symbolizes heroic self-sacrifice. David stole Uriah’s life, represented by the lamb-like figure in Nathan’s parable, and though he repents, the price must be paid. Bathsheba’s nameless son becomes ill, and David prays desperately for his life, fasting and lying on the ground for seven days. When the baby dies, the courtiers are afraid to tell the king, fearing the extremity of his grief. When David learns of the death, he astonishes them by his calm. He arises, washes and anoints himself, worships in the house of the Lord, and calls for food. In response to the courtiers’ questions, he replies: While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept, for I said, “Who knows? The Lord may be gracious to me, and the child may live” But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me. (2 Sam. 12: 22–23)

When David recognizes that he will follow the child, he acknowledges his own mortality, the human limitations that define him. He relinquishes his tyrannical hold on a spurious command over life and death. Because David does not hold back but is willing to give his own life back to its source, God gives him Bathsheba’s second son, Solomon, the wisest of the Davidic line and the builder of the temple. The motif of the second son replacing the first (Isaac/Ishmael, Jacob/Esau) is a complex symbol representing the ongoing life that perdures (surprisingly) because of the hero’s sacrificial transformation. The rest of David’s reign is successful in terms of military victories and increasing riches, but his numerous children fight incessantly. The most dramatic incident involves incest, murder, and rebellion, centering around Absalom, David’s handsome look-alike son. He avenges himself on his half-brother Ammon, the heir apparent, for the rape of Tamar, his sister. When Absalom rebels against David, his military skills, his charm, and his wiles make him a formidable opponent. In spite of this, David loves his beautiful son, perhaps because he is so much like him. When Absalom is at

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his most dangerous, Joab, the man who killed Uriah, kills Absalom, and David weeps. David has always been careful to appear innocent in the deaths of his many rivals (Saul, Jonathan, Abner, Ishbaal, Uriah). Joab’s role from the beginning has been to advance David’s fortunes through violence. He represents, perhaps, the dark and ultimately uncontrollable aspect of David’s reach for power. On his deathbed, David orders the death of Joab. The Davidic monarchy remained undivided only through the reign of Solomon. Fratricidal struggles led to the rise of two separate kingdoms: the ten tribes of Israel in the north, and the two southern tribes, called Judah, centered in Jerusalem. The Assyrians scattered the northern tribes in 722 BCE. In 587, the Babylonians destroyed the temple and carried the people of Judah into exile, ending the reign of Zedekiah, the last Davidic king.

P ROPHETS Prophetic commentary on the kings is a resounding amplification of Samuel’s warnings against the monarchy. After David and Solomon, the heroic mantle passes to the prophets (navi’im), marginal figures, outsiders opposed by monarchical and priestly institutions. Unlike the court prophets of other Mesopotamian cultures, Israel’s prophets reject the truisms of military and economic wisdom: “Might makes right.” The prophets stand almost alone, not only against the ambitions of the court but against the established religious cult of the temple. When the prophets speak truth to power, defending the helpless, the institutional powers turn on them. Like so many modern heroes, their dragons are the state and status quo. Tribal heroes defend against outside dangers; prophets and martyrs must resist domestic powers, defying the narcissistic aims of the societies in which they live. Commitment to the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor is the prerogative of strong people. It allows them to see past the demands of ego to choose the greater good. This liberating vision of the law allows free choice and thus enables the acceptance of responsibility. Free people serve the law and the powerless whom the law protects. The prophets defend the covenant to the death, defying the logic of self-preservation in answer to an imperative more compelling than life itself. Many readers assume that the prophets’ main targets were pagan gods or cultic behaviors—feasts, cleansing rituals, sacrifice, food restrictions. But that is not the case. Prophetic tirades are usually directed against the

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people and leadership of the chosen people. Nor are cultic practices rejected as such. Across the ancient world, customs and cult, woven together in a double strand, form the basis of community identity. The network of ritual forms an expressive tapestry, allowing members to participate in an enactment of the sacred harmonies evident in nature. Ceremonies of initiation, celebration, mourning mark the great passages in life. Joseph Campbell calls rituals “second wombs,” nurturing human beings through a prolonged infancy. Cultic practices are enormously important in sustaining group life, linking human experience to worship, providing an indispensable dimension of meaning to unremarkable lives. The prophetic tirades are not rejections of the rituals and customs but call for a higher level of actualization. The Law must be lived out in life as well as enacted in ritual. If the Covenant is reduced to formulae it will die, since all social structures are contingent, subject to change. Prophetic literature seldom mentions the Ten Commandments; when the navi’im rail at false gods, they are not primarily denouncing literal idol worship but the worship of power, the failure to maintain the laws of covenant as over against the pagan core of Pharaoh’s dominance system. The rejection of cult practices is usually in the context of social injustice. In its practical applications, the standard of virtue is care for widows and orphans, the powerless members of society. Living the covenant is expressed symptomatically in care for the helpless. One follows from another like fruit from the blossom. If compassion and social justice are absent, then so is God’s law. The essence of the covenant requirement is “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic. 6:8). Emmanuel Levinas describes the covenant duty as “an obligation toward the body, the duty to feed and shelter . . . Abraham’s descendents are men of all nations; every man who is truly a man is probably a descendent of Abraham” (Du Sacre au Saint 19, in Omer-Sherman 2006, 12). Unlike the Greek and Roman prophets who foretell predestined outcomes, Israel’s oracles never present future events as unavoidable (Auerbach 1992). Even the most dire predictions are hedged by the possibility of repentance and salvation. The prophetic oracles convey a quality of inevitability in the sense that they describe the predictable workings of moral realities: “Pride goes before a fall, Violence begets violence.” The hardships described by the prophecies are not, however, imposed by a vengeful god but are the products of the free choices of the people. They bespeak a recognition of communal responsibility quite different from that represented by other state religions centered on the power of the ruler. Luck and fate play a powerful role in the ancient world, perhaps

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because most people had little experience of personal control over their destinies. From the viewpoint of the Prophets, outcomes, happy or otherwise, are the products of good choices or bad. The prophetic emphasis on social justice marks a move away from retributive justice as the mechanism for rewards and punishments in life. The concept that good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds punished is partly true in that people are punished by their sins (“Sow what you reap,” “What goes around comes around”) But if applied too broadly, retributive justice supports caste systems where the powerful are perceived as morally superior; wealth is seen as a mark of divine favor. The prophetic voice challenges this equation by presenting the prophets themselves as the very embodiment of suffering innocence. Their meditations on the mystery of undeserved suffering carry forward the themes raised in accounts of Abel’s murder, the binding of Isaac, Joseph’s fall and Pharaoh’s slaughter of the firstborn. Elijah, one of the earliest prophets, is locked in dramatic combat with King Ahab and his pagan wife, Jezebel (1 Kings: 17–19). The tale is developed in broad terms as a face-to-face confrontation between Jahweh and Baal. Elijah, a fugitive, hiding among widows and orphans, stands alone against crowds of dancing, chanting pagan prophets, and priests. He summons the Lord to perform spectacular feats, like raining fire from heaven, to demonstrate his power over earth, air, fire, and water. After showing the pagans his control of the four elements, Jahweh reveals himself to Elijah in a soft breeze, a sound of silence. The power experienced by the prophet is of a different order, stronger, gentler, more basic than the pyrotechnics the Lord displays to the pagans. Elijah’s deeper vision is an earned wisdom, made possible by his faithfulness to the core of the covenant. Later prophets—those who wrote or dictated books in their own names—do not engage in miraculous feats of control, but, like Elijah, they are lovers and champions of the poor. Amos (750 BCE) condemns the Northern Kingdom of Israel: Because they have sold the virtuous man for silver And the poor man for a pair of sandals, Because they trample on the heads of ordinary people And push the poor out of their path. (Amos 2:6–7)

Speaking for Jahweh, Amos rejects cultic worship because it cannot replace justice and compassion:

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I hate and despise your feasts I take no pleasure in your solemn festivals . . . Let me have no more of the din of your chanting . . . But let justice flow like water, And integrity like an unfailing stream. (Amos 5: 21–24)

Hosea, another prophet from the Northern Kingdom, laments reliance on empty ritual: “What the Lord wants is Love, not sacrifice; knowledge of God, not holocausts” (Hos. 6:6). Isaiah of Jerusalem (742–701 BCE) develops a similar theme: I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity, Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; They have become a burden to me . . . Your hands are full of blood, Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean . . . Cease to do evil, learn to do good; Seek justice, rescue the oppressed, Defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (Is. 1:13–17)

Jerusalem, once full of justice, now shelters murderers. The self-indulgent princes are rebels, consorting with gangsters. Wealthy women are haughty, walking with outstretched necks, mincing and tinkling with anklets and crescents and nose rings (Is. 3:16). The powerful rely upon euphemisms and double-speak, calling “evil good, and good evil” (Is. 5:20). They are “heroes in drinking wine” and they “acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocents of their rights” (Is. 5:22–23). “They do not defend the orphan and the widow’s case does not come before them” (Is. 1:23). Isaiah reports Jahwehs’s furious words: “The spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?” (Is. 3:14–15). Rabbi Michael Lerner points out that in some situations of oppression and helplessness a belief in a warrior god is virtually inevitable. When Moses led the Hebrews out of slavery, they rejoiced at the sight of the drowning Egyptians and praised their God as a “man of war,” proclaiming, “Your right hand, Lord, is mighty in power!” (Exod. 15:3–4). The limitations of the warrior stance become apparent when the tables are turned and the powerful use violence against the helpless: “Existing inequalities and systems of oppression are ignored and social justice, peace, and non-violence are dismissed as pretty thoughts about some

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future messianic era.” (Lerner 2006, 33). While the Hebrew prophets lived in violent times and sometimes invoked the right hand of God, they remained insistent on social justice. The prophetic preference for good deeds over ritual suggests an interiorization and assimilation of the meaning of sacrifice. Images of initiation, self-sacrifice, and rebirth represent transformations of consciousness once projected on archetypal heroes like Moses and the patriarchs. Where the former heroes triumphed, the navi’im are often defeated by the false gods of secular power. Their labors are ridiculed, their messages unheard or rejected. Moses fought against Pharaoh, but Isaiah wrestles with an intimate foe, the leaders and people of Judah. Their function precludes the prophets from starring in narrative roles such as we have seen in the earlier books. They are more like mentors, sometimes scapegoats, on the stage of a drama focusing on the collective fate of the chosen people. In the (relatively) glorious days of David and Solomon, the land is rich in wisdom and good fortune. But as the kings grow increasingly careless of the law the moral landscape changes and the people find themselves in a wasteland of chaos and violence. The prophets are threshold figures, standing partly in history and partly in the divine plane. They speak both for God and for the suffering people, forging a passional linkage, almost an identity, of the human and divine. Martin Buber (1956) suggests in The Prophetic Faith that their suffering opened a two-way street in which the navi’im assimilate God’s word, and God absorbs their pain. Ezekiel dramatized his suffering and the fate of the people by symbolic actions such as binding himself with ropes, cutting off his hair, remaining dumb. When the ten tribes of the North were destroyed (722 BCE) and the Babylonians carried off Judah and razed the Temple (587 BCE), the covenant people appeared to be extinct. Ezekiel (36–37) consoled the remnant with assurances that the dry bones of Judah would arise and a new age would dawn: “A new heart I will give and a new spirit within you.” All the tribes of the earth will see the Lord’s glory in a new Jerusalem. “The Land that was desolate [will] become the garden of Eden.”

I SAIAH The Book of Isaiah, written over two centuries (740–510), probably by three writers, covers the period from the fall of the Northern Kingdom to Judah’s return from exile. It is not a chronological account, but it deals with archetypal events corresponding to the narrative pattern of the hero

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myth. These include the wasteland, the hero’s agon, and the emergence of a new vision, symbolized by a reborn holy city. Isaiah of Jerusalem begins his prophecy when the corrupt monarchy has cast the people into a moral wasteland: “The whole head is sick, the whole heart faint / From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it / but bruises and sores and bleeding wounds.” (Is. 1:5–6) To begin the heroic transformation, the prophet, as mentor, must cure the people’s blindness, must reorient them by translating the Lord’s word into a new and accessible format. The word comes to Isaiah in an overwhelming vision of Jahweh seated on his throne, filling the cosmos with his glory. Seraphim songs cause the pivots of the universe to shake in resonance with the divine word. The prophet is overwhelmed. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips . . . yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts” (Is. 6:5). A seraph (burning one) touches his lips with a live coal taken from the altar, and Isaiah is empowered to speak the word. As in the Genesis creation stories, God’s creative word is an ordering force, distilling higher levels of meaning from the ambient chaos.1 Initially, the people ignore the prophetic message. Isaiah says to them: “Keep hearing but do not comprehend, Keep looking but do not understand” (Is. 6:9). When disaster strikes, they are uncomprehending. Like most orphans in the wasteland, the Israelites experience pain as blank, undifferentiated misery, carrying no meaning (“Why me?”). At best, the catastrophe is perceived as punishment for broken laws. The prophetic message is a call for repentance, not necessarily in the commonly understood meaning of contrition for sins, but in a secondary sense suggesting a rethinking (re-pense), a change in orientation. For the remnant, those who eventually hear the prophetic word, new meanings are possible. Selfknowledge transforms orphans into nascent heroes, alien to the wasteland, and bound on a journey to the restored Jerusalem. They still suffer but now in a purposeful way like the prophets. When the prophet/hero shouts “Send Me!” he accepts suffering as one of the defining aspects of his identity. Few people who persecute and grind down the poor are aware that they do so and that it is wrong. Socialization privileges the powerful, blinding them and their anxious emulators to the suffering of the poor. In the period of the monarchy and the prophets, Judean society descended into a sharp stratification where the vast majority of the people were landless, unskilled laborers, servants, and beggars. A small middle class of traders, skilled craftsmen, and hangers-on at court and the temple supported the very powerful, in denial about the implications of their own marginalized status. Recent studies of conformity, social consent, ask why so many

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people work against their own economic interests to support projects benefiting the powerful (Hogan 2002: 1–5). The motivation is not simply fear of reprisal, but an almost complete inability to identify with the weak and despised. Orphans, in this perilous middle ground between the power of the elites and the desperation of the masses, dream of becoming persecutors themselves. As liberation theologians note, people at low levels of status want feverishly to identify with the upper classes. Instead of acknowledging guilt, orphans project their own limitations onto the widows and orphans on the lowest rungs. Predatory behavior directed against the lowest is justified as part of the structure, supporting the right order of things. Violence against the self is seen as grossly unjust, a mysterious, irrational response, unfair in view of the obedience of the orphan to the powers that be. The prophet’s role is to open the eyes of all the actors in this confused moral drama. Events vindicating the prophet’s word force some of these orphans to recognize themselves among the wretched of the earth. When the whole social structure collapses because of war or some other catastrophe, most people are plunged even more deeply into moral chaos. If a prophet rises, he may open the eyes of a remnant to a healing Law running counter to Pharaoh’s rules. Prophets are models of heroic suffering, and some people, who cannot identify with the sufferings of the widows and orphans, can empathize with them. Like the prophets, the surviving remnant is compelled to acknowledge “unclean lips,” personal guilt, and to withdraw the projection of sin from society’s scapegoats. Because they now recognize their own sin they can let go of sin and the resulting guilt. When the delusional self-image of righteous power disappears, so does sin, the compulsive behavior directed against the less powerful. Without guilt, the nature of suffering changes; like the prophets, the awakened remnant is willing to bear the consequences of personal and societal guilt. The enigmatic figure of Isaiah’s “suffering servant”2 is modeled on the navi’im and on the reborn remnant of the people. He appears in the context of a profound change of consciousness. The “righteous one” bears the Lord’s spirit and will “bring justice to the nations” (Is. 42:1–3). “A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.” The servant’s role is “to open the eyes that are blind.” The past is finished and God will speak new things: “Sing to the Lord a new song.” In Exodus, the Lord is a ferocious soldier uttering a war cry, and in Isaiah, he is like a woman crying out in labor, gasping and panting in an effort to bring new life. In the second song (Is. 49:1–6), the servant is described as a polished arrow in God’s quiver, his mouth “like a sharp sword.” Called Israel, the servant will reach beyond his task of restoring the tribes of

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Jacob to be a “light to the nations.” In chapters 52 and 53, his suffering is emphasized: “So marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance.” He has “no form or majesty.” Like the wretched of the earth, the servant has no social status but is a nameless, invisible outsider. “We like to avert our eyes from the real victims” (Heim 2001, 3): “He was despised and rejected by others; A man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity” (Is. 53:3). Yet again the servant’s universal role is to reveal new truths to all the nations: “That which has not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate” (Is. 52:15). This vital revelation seems to depend upon the role of vicarious suffering: Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases . . . But he was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. (Is. 53:4–5) Because he poured himself out to death and was numbered with the transgressors yet he bore the sin of many. (Is. 53:12)

Just how does this model of vicarious suffering translate into salvation for sinners? When the law is understood in an extrinsic way (imposed from above) sinners must pay a penalty for their offenses. Vicarious suffering, of an animal or a savior, pays the debt, like a simple banking exchange. In the intrinsic model the subject—the hero, prophet, saint—understands that the authority of the Law is intrinsic. It is not to be obeyed simply because God has commanded it but because evil acts are in themselves destructive and good deeds support life for the community. The heroic agon of the suffering servant is a willing acceptance of pain caused by the sins of society. The servant bears witness to the true nature of sin by enduring the pain in his own body. It is not that heroes volunteer to be victims. Initially, they neither want nor expect to suffer. In very simple stories the hero decides that he can kill dragons and goes on fighting them until he meets the one that is too big for him. Then he suffers. Sometimes the hero is so incensed by an attack that he responds without much deliberation, thus skirting the issue of his willingness to suffer. In more developed scenarios, heroes often reject the call at first because they suspect that it may lead to unforeseen and painful outcomes. Often they seek talismans and advisors to avoid danger. Are heroes innocents? Not precisely; they start out as orphans, fallen from the

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garden, living in the wasteland in ignorance of their potential identities. In most cases, including the case of the prophets, potential heroes must acknowledge their own shortcomings before taking on the established powers of chaos. Isaiah says, “I am lost, I am a man of unclean lips.” (Is. 6:5) Elijah, Isaiah and the others do not suffer primarily because of personal wrongdoing, but because they transgress against the power structures of Israel. Since they could have walked away, refusing the call, they can be said to have brought their troubles on themselves. But in choosing to answer the call of the covenant of God, they adhere to a higher wisdom. Heroes and prophets are virtuous rather than innocent. Freely chosen suffering, absent guilt, is a transformative experience, quite different from the externally imposed oppression undergone by innocents and orphans. In closed power systems, neither the victim nor the torturer is clearly aware of the nature of the evil being committed because societal standards often permit the elite to exercise unchecked and unexamined power over others. With a tongue like a sharp sword, the prophet pierces through the veils of social complicity. Ultimately, however, it is not the sayings of the prophets that prevail; it is their defiance and the inevitable punishment that seize the imagination. Consciousness is uniquely prepared, across all cultures, to recognize the heroic agon. When a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King appears, he breaks through the societal veil and we recognize him. Because of the fascination and revelatory power of the heroic commitment to withstand injustice, viewers empathize with heroes and begin to be able themselves to extend dangerous compassion to the oppressed. The ability to recognize oneself in the powerless brings an awareness of common mortality and human limitation. Self-knowledge and compassion for the suffering break the cycle of sin and save souls.

T HE M ESSIANIC K INGDOM In Isaiah, descriptions of the heroic servant are interspersed with images of a peaceful messianic kingdom. One of the most striking is in Chapter 2 where all nations stream to the Lord’s mountain to be instructed by the Word: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (Is. 2:4). The Lord’s word wins out over the military power of the Pharaoh archetype. In Isaiah 9, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Pharaoh’s willful blindness and hardness of heart are overcome by the light. The messianic child is named “Wonderful Counselor,

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Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace . . . and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David.” In this new world, the sword hanging over the house of David is withdrawn. Whatever the historical circumstances (critical interpretations relate Isaiah’s messianic references to various historical figures—Hezekiah, Cyrus, etc.), the symbols associated with the peaceful kingdom point to the final establishment of the new Jerusalem, the garden realized and reappropriated. “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” A second innocence, a return to the transparent awareness of the garden, resolves the oppositions of the conflicted world of power: strong versus weak, life versus death. When Adam and Eve seized the knowledge of good and evil, they fell into the world of powerful oppositions. The new song, harmonizing the opposites, lions and lambs, introduces a different rhythm, a more subtle synthesis of meaning. The Davidic child/king does not judge “by what his eyes see . . . or his ears hear.” He looks beyond the standard measures of perception to defend the poor and the meek of the earth. Like the prophets, his words are weapons, his tongue a sword (Is. 11:4). In his reign, “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9). In a related passage in Ezekiel 47, the waters of life flow from under the altar of the new temple. Like the four rivers of paradise the water nourishes living creatures and fruit trees line the lush banks. In Joel 2, the Lord gives early, abundant rain and overflowing plenty. As always, the final gift is revelation: “Then afterward, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; Your sons and daughters shall prophecy, Your old men shall dream dreams, And your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28). In Isaiah 55, the concluding hymn of Deutero-Isaiah reminds us that “my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways” (Is. 55:8). The rain and snow come down from heaven to make the deserts fertile and life flourish. So God’s word comes to make wisdom live: “[My word] will not return to me empty, but shall accomplish that which I purpose” (Is. 55:11). Jeremiah describes the new age as a new covenant with Israel and Judah: I will put my law within them, I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me from the least of them to the Greatest. (Jer. 31:31–4)

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The new and passionate knowing of the kingdom is like entering a marriage. The prophets are said to be in love with Wisdom, Sophia, the radiant woman described in Proverbs, Sirach and the Book of Wisdom. The prophetic word is like the creative Word “In the beginning” of the Genesis story. It is more than a verbal sign, more than an organizing principle like the logos of rational discourse. It is a living code, a seed pregnant with meaning. Like God’s word, Sophia emerges “from the mouth of the Most High (Sir. 24:3–9): “She is a ‘breath of the power of God . . . a spotless mirror of the working of God’ (Ws. 7:25–26). She ‘plays,’ or dances before the Lord and is his ‘delight day by day’ (Prov. 8:36). Her active qualities are stressed because she expresses a kinetic universe, developing in manifold forms. She penetrates ‘all intelligent, pure and most subtle spirits; for Sophia is quicker to move than any motion’ (Ws. 7:23). She is harmony ‘holding all things together’ (Ws. 1:7) while ‘ever playing in his presence, dancing everywhere in his world’” (Prov. 8:30). Shekina (Glory), another feminine embodiment of God’s divine wisdom, is described in Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God. The vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork. / Day discourses it to day, night to night hands on the knowledge.” Like Sophia, Glory plays through the world, moving endlessly in the ring-dance of the nights and days. Glory and Wisdom represent “the anima mundi, a matrix or invisible network maintaining interconnections among all things” (Edinger 1986: 132). Biblical Wisdom is a product of praxis, a hard-won vision costing the prophet “not less than everything.” Her living meaning is written in the heart. Chapters 54 and 55, the concluding sections of Deutero-Isaiah, depict a divine wedding following the death of the suffering servant (Is. 53:12): “Do not fear,” says the Lord, “For your maker is your husband. The Lord of Hosts is his name . . . For the Lord has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, Like the wife of a man’s youth when she is cast off . . . For a brief moment I abandoned you, But with great compassion I will gather you.” (Is. 54:5–8)

The call to the wedding feast echoes Sophia’s call to the banquet in Proverbs 9: “Ho, everyone who thirsts come to the waters; And you that have no money, come buy and eat. Come buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Is. 55:1). Just as the prophets’ sufferings bring

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them to union with Sophia, the restored people emerge as the heavenly bride entering a new kingdom: “For you shall go out in joy, and be lead back in peace; the mountains and hills before you shall burst into song, And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Is. 55:12). The prophetic meditation on power, beginning with Moses and ending with the latter prophets, opposes the tyrannical structures of Pharaoh to a developing understanding of Jahweh’s law or word. The practical outcome of adherence to the divine law is social justice. Israel’s kings, even David, fall short, and the Promised Land becomes a wasteland, like Egypt, the house of slavery. The prophets are heroic mentors, guiding a remnant of the people to a renewed vision, a covenant written in the heart instead of on stone. The eventual entry into the new Jerusalem is postponed until the coming of the Messiah, a revelatory figure who will “judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth” (Is. 11:2). On that great day, “the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces” (Is. 25:8), and death will be swallowed up forever. As in the typical conclusion of the hero narrative, Isaiah describes a revelation like a rebirth and a royal marriage. Jerusalem reborn will be “called by a new name” (Is. 2:2). No longer a wasteland, she will be called “My Delight is in Her,” and the Lord will marry her, “as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you.”

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he traditional reading of the Book of Job casts it as a theodicy, an effort to reconcile God’s justice with the suffering of the innocent. Certainly, that is the focus of Job’s comforters and of the old folktale that is the frame story. In the opening and closing chapters, the old story describes a bet between God and Satan and explores the notion that virtue is rewarded and sin is punished. In the main body of the book, Job’s comforters engage in a series of debates over the fine points of retributive justice, while Job, in mounting anger and confusion, rejects their pieties and demands a confrontation with divine reality. God responds to his challenge by carrying Job alive into a cosmic whirlwind where the morning stars sing and the sons of God shout for joy. Job lies down in darkness, wrestling, like Jacob, with a familiar stranger. The scale of the vision, the bounty of creation, the unthinkable multitudes in chorus—God’s glory, in short—leaves Job stunned. The disjunction in scale between human awareness and the enormous reality of the divine transforms Job. He is speechless because what he experiences carries him to a wisdom beyond any human matrix. “I had heard of your by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you” (Job 42:5). Job’s vision has its counterparts in other stories of divine revelation. The hero’s final insight is often presented as a dislocation of sense experience. Like Oedipus or Lear’s counterpart, Gloucester, the hero may be blinded. Poets and prophets, like Homer and Tiresias, are sometimes blind. “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us” (Thoreau, Walden, 369). Heroes are often maddened, like Lear and Ahab, or they are prophets, “despised and rejected.” The twice born awaken to a vastly expanded dimension of experience unintelligible to others. They must

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“take on the mystery of things,” as “God’s spies” (Lear). They speak in riddles, like Tiresias or Nathan, or talk nonsense like Dostoevsky’s idiot, Shakespeare’s fools. They sing, or remain mute. Melville’s Billy Budd, the innocent, stutters and cannot read. He is defective in the standard forms of communication, but he can sing. His voice has “the clear melody of a singing bird” (729). In “The Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman describes the beatific consummation with his soul as a silent song: Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat. Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

The lover’s tongue, an instrument of speech, plunges silently to the poet’s heart: “Swiftly rose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth” (Song of Myself, Sect 5, 4–10). In Psalm 19, the heavens proclaim God’s Glory: There is no speech, nor are there words their voice is not heard; Yet their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. (Ps. 19: 3–4)

William Blake, the poet, describes the stunning power of final revelation. For practical people, the sun appears to be “a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea.” On their level, the world of ordinary experience is radically simplified, mass produced, validated by social consensus. But when the saints look at the sun, they see “an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host singing ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty’” (Blake, “Vision of the Last Judgment,” 88.). Job’s struggle is rewarded by the cosmic vision of the whirlwind. He doesn’t win or lose his argument with God. After his vision, winning, losing, and even suffering do not matter in the same way. He sees past the opposites, the knowledge of good and evil, to the “still point of the turning world” (Eliot 1952, 20, 119). “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.” Blameless, upright and God-fearing he lives with his family in a paradisal round of feasting and worship. One day the Lord gives a reception for “the heavenly beings,” or “sons of God.” One of the guests is called Ha-satan (Heb), meaning the accuser (adversary, prosecutor).1 God calls Satan’s attention to Job: “There is no one like him on the earth” (Job 1:8). Satan precipitates the crisis by asking, “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (Job 1:9). He points to all of Job’s blessings as the reason for his good

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behavior. “But stretch our your hand now and touch all he has, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 1:11). God takes Satan’s bet, forbidding only injury to Job’s person. We watch as a series of messengers reach Job, describing the destruction of his flocks and servants and at last the deaths of his children. The messengers’ refrain is, “I alone have escaped to tell you.” Then Job arose, tore his robe, shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshipped. He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:20–21)

At the next heavenly meeting, God challenges Satan: “[Job] still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason” (Job 2:3). Satan ups the ante, “Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face!” The Lord responds to Satan’s provocation, asking only that Job’s life be spared. Satan afflicts him with “loathsome sores” over his whole body. As he sits in the ashes, scraping his scabs with a potsherd, Job’s wife appears exasperated at his passivity: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.” He responds: “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” He does not “sin with his lips” (Job 2:9–10); that is, he does not curse God. The prologue ends here, as three of Job’s friends enter to console him. In the epilogue, the frame story re-emerges. Job’s integrity or patience or passivity pays off, and he lives happily ever after. Virtually no one finds this acceptable as a final reading. It is evident from the contrast between the folktale and the speeches that make up the body of the book that the sixth century writer of Job used the old tale as an outdated, simplistic rendering of the issues of suffering and justice. As Martin Buber points out, no serious reader accepts the fickle God, too easily manipulated by Satan, as a portrait of the Jahweh of Scripture. The tale with its happy ending functions as an ironic framework for the serious discussion of the comforters and the revelation in the whirlwind.

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W ISDOM L ITERATURE : E CCLESIASTES The Book of Job is part of the Wisdom Literature of the Hebrew Scriptures. Works such as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon offer a range of material from conventional sayings and practical advice to the highest reaches of religious insight. The Book of Ecclesiastes (Quoheleth, Heb), written a bit later than Job, but part of the same biblical wisdom tradition, presents a skeptical and paradoxical reflection on the same issues—suffering and justice—that preoccupy the writer of Job. Ecclesiastes seems to weigh in on the side of the utter inscrutability of suffering. “Vanity of Vanity,” says the Teacher, “All is Vanity.” Hebel, the Hebrew word translated as vanity, means a cloud or formless vapor, beyond grasp, like the primal chaos before the shaping Word. “Vanity” suggests the illusory nature of commonly held certainties; life is lived in avoidance of the knowledge of death and in denial of the contingent nature of individuals and of societal structures. The Teacher is identified with Solomon, the wisest of all leaders. He attains fame, riches, pleasure, but it is all vanity. Full of doubts about the ultimate value of wisdom, the teacher sets out on a Faustian course, seeking “madness and folly” (Ecc. 1:17), but that too is “chasing the wind.” He sees “that wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness . . . Yet I perceived that the same fate befalls all . . . What happens to the fool will happen to me also” (Ecc. 2:17). When He recognizes the inevitability of death, the Teacher asks: “How can the wise die just like fools? So I hated life . . . All is vanity.” Job is not aware that his suffering is part of a testing process, a bet between heavenly beings. The Teacher, however, suspects that suffering may indeed be a test: “I said in my heart with regard to human beings that God is testing them to show that they are but animals” (Ecc. 3:18). Ecclesiastes concludes that the test is rigged; God wants humans to fail the test, “For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other . . . Who knows whether the human spirit goes upward and the spirit of animals down to the earth?” (Ecc. 3:19–21). Job’s initial appraisal of his situation is a similar response to a vision of a world of illusion. Chapter 3 of Job, following the prose prologue, is a darkly magnificent poem of annihilation. Job’s speech is not a mere death wish; it is a curse on time and the day of his own conception: “Let that day perish . . . Let that day be darkness . . . Let that night be barren, let no joyful cry be heard in it . . . may it not see the eyelids of the morning.” If he had died at birth, Job would be “at rest with kings and counselors.” In the grave, he says, the prisoners and slaves are at ease, free at last from their masters. Why, he asks, “is light given to one in misery, and life to the

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bitter in soul, who long for death.” (Job 3:20–21). The prophetic call to care for the powerless remains unanswered. Like Job, Ecclesiastes sees the hopeless suffering of the poor: “Look, the tears of the oppressed, with no one to comfort them. / On the side of their oppressors there was power, with no one to comfort them” (Ecc. 4:1). In this most desolate of wastelands, there is no comfort, no illusion of comfort even for the powerful. “And I thought the dead who had already died more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun” (Ecc. 4:1–3). The editors (and readers) of Ecclesiastes attempt to soften the bleak landscape of vanity, just as Job’s comforters insist upon finding the grounds for both justice and suffering. But Job and the Teacher reject the ameliorative effort in favor of their own observations. Job’s friends speak for the accepted certainties, the social consensus that God is all powerful and all just. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are wellmeaning people who recognize the depth of Job’s suffering and who mourn with him in silence for seven days. Only after Job’s despairing speech do they begin to marshal a defense of divine justice. Since the ostensible setting of the debate is faraway Uz, the friends do not refer to any particular commandments or Israelite ritual behaviors that Job may have broken or neglected. But they are bent on defending the concept of covenant. Covenant, as they understand it, involves an understanding, a mutually agreed-upon contract, that reward follows on good behavior, punishment on bad behavior. No such law binds the pharaoh, or even, for the most part, Israel’s own kings. Rulers in the ancient world were free to behave with the caprice displayed by the folktale God who places a bet on Job. Retributive justice—reward and punishment commensurate with behavior—is a great societal advance, well worth defending. Even Satan sees it as the basis of ethical behavior. Unfortunately, the ecology of moral choices lacks the precision of stone-graven law. Retributive justice operates (when it does) more like a weather system. The sun will shine and the rain and snow will fall in generally predictable patterns, but it rains on both the just and unjust. One may take prudent steps to accommodate to the climate, and on the whole, things even out—good years and bad years. The trouble comes in the attempt to package ecologies as contractual obligations. For one thing, the weather-makers in society tend to provide sunny corners for themselves and forget about the shadow dwellers. Orphans have learned that life is not fair, but they are not really surprised by the vagaries of fortune. In power-based cultures, God is perceived as a figure on the order of an emperor who has little liking for the

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mass of people and fewer obligations. When Jahweh’s covenant appears, it holds out a standard of reason and fairness that is very difficult to achieve in the compromised world of experience. If literalized, the divine covenant is seen as a deal where God owes us for good behavior. If we conflate the biblical term, “orphan,” meaning the helpless, with the myth-study “orphan,” they have much in common. Both fall from some putative garden of maternal nurture into a wasteland of anonymity, harsh rules, and powerful forces. In myth, every orphan is potentially a hero, a child of the King. In Hebrew Scriptures, God is “Father of the fatherless” (Ps. 68:5). But orphans can and do complain about their lots. They are essentially passive figures, unused to making difficult moral choices. Bad luck is the occasion for pouting and ranting against an unfair Daddy. Catastrophes such as befall Job simply confirm the orphan’s worst suspicions of ungovernable chaotic forces at work. The comforters have more insight than orphans, and though they literalize the covenant, they defend it by claiming that Job must have done something to deserve punishment. Figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes rise above the orphans and the comforters too. The Teacher acknowledges that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecc. 9:11). Life is not reasonably ordered, and no one can understand God’s plan (Ecc. 8:16–17). Good people and bad people are in God’s hands, but “whether it is love or hate one does not know” (Ecc. 9:1). Nevertheless, the Teacher advises us: “Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart . . . let your garments be always white . . . Enjoy life with the wife whom you love” (Ecc. 9:7–9). Death ends it all: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do with all your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in sheol, to which you are going” (Ecc. 9:10). Ecclesiastes maintains a stoic despair, but Job comes to see things differently. As he argues, he begins to suspect that the disorder may lie partly in the limitations of his vision. The comforters are excellent rhetoricians, deeply committed to the defense of the theological structure they represent. Eliphaz begins: “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the righteous cut off?” (Job 4:7). The system of retributive justice posits that suffering is reserved for the guilty; if Job suffers, he must be guilty. This tautological argument emerges slowly. Hope lies in God’s saving powers: “For he wounds, but he binds up, he strikes, but his hands heal” (Job 5:18). The comforters suggest that suffering is not merely punitive but corrective: “How happy is the one whom God reproves” (Job 5:17). To be delivered, Job must acknowledge his guilt. But Job can’t stomach their

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arguments: “My appetite refuses to touch them.” He denies wrongdoing, especially of the magnitude commensurate with his terrible sufferings. The debate reaches an impasse and Eliphaz experiences a hair-raising vision: “A spirit glided past my face; the hair of my flesh bristled, It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance. A form was before my eyes; there was silence, then I heard a voice: ‘Can mortals be righteous before God?’” To save their own theological argument, the comforters must assert that all human beings are guilty. “We must recognize that they are fighting for their religious lives: their ‘fear of God’ and the ‘integrity of their ways’ is at stake, and the very existence of the suffering Job has the radical potential to call all this into question” (Humphreys 1985, 105). Job rejects not only their arguments but also their qualifications as commentators: “Who asked you?” “Have I said ‘Make me a gift’?” Or “From your wealth offer a bribe for me?” (Job 7:11). He turns from argument to a lyric expression of the pain of being: Do not human beings have a hard service on earth? And are not their days like the days of a laborer? (Job 7:1) My days are swifter than a runner; They fly away, they see no good. They go by like skiffs of reed, Like an eagle swooping on the prey. (Job 9:26)

Job’s focus narrows and he begins an address to the Almighty: “Am I the Sea or the Dragon that you set a guard on me?” (Job 7:12). Is he some primordial monster, a match for God? He wonders at the disproportion between divine power and the intensity of his suffering. With an acute recognition of the littleness of his being, he wonders whether he can really have offended this mighty God? Mark Twain, addressing the same issue of mismatched power, says he cannot understand how breaking moral laws can injure God, for he is beyond the reach of injury. “I could as easily injure a planet by throwing mud at it” (Paine, 295). Job indulges in irony, parodying Psalm 8, choosing death over life: “I would choose strangling and death rather than this body. / I loathe my life. I would not live forever.” Though Job is furious, he is neither suicidal nor passive. He has run into a cognitive blank wall—He cannot say that he is guilty; he will not say that God is malevolent, and he is all too aware of the limited span of vision imposed by his own mortal nature. Here the direction of the drama shifts as Job begins to realize that there is a massive disconnect between the divine plan and his own capacities and formats for understanding. “He is

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not a mortal, as I am, that I might answer him . . . there is no umpire between us, who might lay his hands on us both” (Job 9:32–33). He addresses God directly: “Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as humans see?” (Job 10:4). He rejects the comforters; “What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you” (Job 13:1). They are covering up for God; “As for you, you whitewash with lies . . . Will you speak falsely for God? Will you plead the case for God?”

J OB ’ S C HALLENGE Job wants to argue his own case with God: Let come on me what may, I will take my flesh in my teeth, and put my life in my hand. See he will kill me; I have no hope, But I will defend my ways to his face. (Job 13:13–15)

God wins his wager with Satan when Job decides to risk his life, his very being, in a confrontation with the Almighty. Satan claims that humans act only on the basis of reward and punishment. “All that people have,” Satan says, “they will give to save their lives” (Job 2:4). He cannot imagine that anyone would be willing to die for a cause. The calculus of quid pro quo breaks down under that exchange, since the dead cannot enjoy the fruits of the trade. Job’s decision to take his life in his hands, to risk death, displays a splendid indifference to the immutable imperative for selfpreservation. Job puts his life on the line for wisdom and self-knowledge: “Let me know my sin.” He does not ask for a refund of his money or any other sort of reparations. He sues God for full disclosure, for insight into his own nature, and for a revelation of the divine reality. “Why do you hide your face?” (Job 13:24). Though Job has courage, he is terrified beyond the limits of the usual understanding of “fear of the Lord.” “Fear” in Job’s context does not mean “taking God seriously” or experiencing anxiety about God. It is a visceral response to the unimaginable otherness of God, the disproportion between fathomless meaning and the limits of human perception. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.” While the Job of the folktale is presented as a typical man of virtue and wealth, Job in his suffering is a more complex figure. In Chapter 29 Job reminisces about the old days when he was “in his prime.” The Almighty walked with him, and when he entered the assemblies, the nobles were

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silent and the “voices of princes were hushed.” He stood above them all in his capacity to speak with authority; “My word dropped upon them like dew” (Job 29:22). He was the just man described by the prophets, savior of widows, defender of orphans. He was eyes to the blind, feet to the lame. Job “broke the fangs of the unrighteous” (Job 29:9–17). As Gustavo Gutierrez points out, Job’s defense of the poor implies active resistance to powerful oppressors (1988, 40). When he brings the poor into remembrance, he broadens his perspective, for, like him, they suffer undeservedly. “Job begins to free himself from an ethic centered on personal rewards and punishments and to pass to another focused on the needs of one’s neighbors” (Gutierrez 1988, 31). As a warrior-hero Job demonstrates, throughout his life, a capacity to act freely, outside the bounds of hope and fear. His selfless championing of the defenseless is a demonstration of the limitations of Satan’s understanding of human capacities. Job envisions a formal trial of sorts: “Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me! Oh that I had the indictment written by my adversary” (Job 31:35–36).2 So certain is Job of vindication that he wants to write his defense in a book, with an iron pen (Job. 19:23–27). He will have a Redeemer, a go-el (Heb) or defense attorney,3 playing the role opposite to Ha-Satan’s prosecutorial role. The text is muddled, and though it appears to suggest the possibility of life after death, it is unlikely, as the doctrine of resurrection appears only later, in Maccabean times (see Dan. 12:1–3): For I know that my Redeemer lives And that at the last he will stand upon the earth; And after my skin has been destroyed Then in my flesh I shall see God Whom I shall see on my side, And my eyes shall behold, and not another. (Job 19:25–27)

In an elaborate three-part emphasis, Job declares that he will see his defender, his salvation, with his own eyes. God, he says, will be “on [his] side.” W. Lee Humphreys points out that when Job demands that God answer his questions in the format of a trial court, “he defines the perspective from which the answer must come, for there is in the posing of questions this field-defining quality” (1985, 109). When he demands that God answer in the legalistic terms used by the comforters, he seeks the security of a familiar (though inadequate) language format. Job is not guilty of breaking any of the Ten Commandments; indeed, he goes beyond to meet the prophetic demands of social justice. Even the Lord

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assures Satan that he is perfect. No wonder Job is “righteous in his own eyes” (Job 32:1). Like all heroic figures, Job is prone to hubris. “Hubris is not linked to the small crimes of ordinary mortals but to Promethean attempts to be wholly self-defining and totally in control of one’s life” (Humphreys 1985, 109). Job will not recognize his true self until God turns the tables and brings him into another arena of trial.

T HE V OICE

FROM THE

W HIRLWIND

Job’s last agon begins with a voice from the whirlwind (Job 38:2): “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.” “Gird up your loins” is a challenge to close combat. Like Jacob and Moses, Job will wrestle with God in the darkness of his unknowing. “Where were you,” God asks, “when I laid the foundation of the earth?” He describes himself as the maker who appears in Proverbs 8, marking out the framework of the cosmos, setting limits and giving form to the universe. He is the master workman laying the cornerstones to the song of the morning stars and the joy of the choiring angels. The infant sea bursts from the womb and God contains his child with swaddling bands made of storm clouds. He commands morning and evening, the gates of darkness and death. “Where is the way,” he asks, “to the dwelling of light?” “Surely you know,” he taunts Job, “for you were born then and the number of your days is great” (Job 38:21). The next series of questions focuses on images of husbandry and parenting. “Have you entered the storehouse of the snow?” Who has cut a channel for the thunderbolts, bringing “rain on a land where no one lives.” God’s works extend beyond human concerns, spreading bounty “to satisfy the waste and desolate land.” He binds the chains of the Pleiades and looses the cords of Orion as if the stars were to be reined and loosed like running horses. Beginning in verse 39 we watch God care for the wild animals, hunting prey for the young lions, providing for the raven “when its young ones cry to God and wander for lack of food.” The mountain goats give birth, and “their young ones become strong, they grow up in the open; they go forth and do not return to them.” The Lord describes an ostrich, wings flapping wildly, running from its own eggs deposited in the sand. The foolish bird has been given “no share in understanding.” Yet when it spreads its plumes and runs, it speeds away from all its pursuers. “It laughs at the horse and its rider.” Each animal has its own perfection. They serve the

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Lord by being themselves, not by slaving for Pharaoh. The climactic image of the series is a magnificent portrait of a warhorse; it leaps mightily and shakes its mane, eager for battle: With fierceness and rage it swallows the ground; It cannot stand still at the sound of the trumpet. When the trumpet sounds, it says ‘Aha!’ From a distance it smells the battle, The thunder of the captains and the shouting. (Job 39:24–5)

In the last verses in chapter 39, we revisit the carnivores hunting food: an eagle nests on the rocky crag, and “its young ones soak up blood.” Robert Alter comments on the “peculiar beauty of violence” (1985, 85–111) in the Lord’s portrayal of nature. The creatures are “strong, fierce, inaccessible.” The images of the wild beasts show natural life in polarity with natural death—like sunrise and sunset; the process we experience as life is completed by death. Nothing can live without feeding on the leavings of other lives. In their alien splendor, the beasts represent a side of their creator largely suppressed in biblical accounts. While acknowledging God as the creator of all, the scriptural God is usually focused on human beings, their sins, their faith. Job’s God doesn’t mention mankind in his speech except to scoff at Job’s limitations. The pageant animals are born, breed and die in a cycle of life feeding on life. They move smoothly in accustomed rhythms, unconcerned with the eventualities of pain, loss, death. Their very simplicity lends them dignity in the face of the hard truth that all life ends in death. Perhaps Job achieves some self-recognition in his vision of the animals. As a young man he was, like them, bold and unafraid. He broke the teeth of the wicked, indifferent to danger, confident of his powers. Alter notes that God’s words from the whirlwind in Chapter 39 are an expansive counterpoint to Job’s prayer for annihilation in Chapter 3. In his despair, Job calls for darkness, while the Lord commands the dawn, opening the way to the dwelling of light. Job’s poem asks that the night of his conception be barren, that no joyful cry be heard from the lovers. God pulls the stormy sea from the bursting womb, while the sons of God shout for joy. In Job’s lament, the weary prisoners rest only in the tomb where “the slaves are free from the masters.” God’s lions and wild goats range free on the steppes and mountains. After the vision of the animals, God challenges Job again. “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?” Against the panoply of life and death, Job’s complaint is reduced to “faultfinding.” Job acknowledges

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his smallness and lays his hand on his mouth, claiming he will not speak again (Job 40:2–4). “Not good enough,” says the Lord. He recognizes Job’s noncommittal response as a ploy to “put God in the wrong” by a failure to acknowledge the truth of the vision. Job must again “gird up his loins” for the final revelation. In his second speech, God introduces Behemoth and Leviathan, chthonic monsters representing a species of chaos beyond the inevitable sequences of life and death. Behemoth is curiously unthreatening. He is modeled on the hippopotamus (known only by hearsay in Israel). Its “bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs are bars of iron” (Job 40:18). It swims powerfully against the rushing river currents. But Behemoth eats only grass and lies under a lotus plant watching the wild animals play. Despite its apparent lack of aggression, Behemoth is beyond human control. No one can take it with a hook or a spear. Behemoth may represent the powerful disruptive forces of nature: hurricanes, droughts, tsunamis, plagues, even wild beasts when they prey on man. It personifies what Hamlet calls the “thousand natural shocks/ that flesh is heir to” (III, i, 62–3). The Lord calls Behemoth “the first of the great acts of God,” suggesting a primitive but universal significance. In one of Dylan Thomas’s poems, the poet notes that all life is sustained by the same energy: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age” (Thomas, 1970, 1104). Images of grass, lotus leaves, and willows suggest a connection with plant life. In many folktales, such figures as the medieval Green Man and the Mayan Corn God are associated with vegetation myths requiring blood sacrifice to ensure the success of crops and the return of spring. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (fourteenth century) is a parable of the heroic confrontation with chance and the dangers of nature. Arthur’s court at Camelot represents the ideal order of civilization: “High were their hearts in halls and chambers, / These lords and ladies, for life was sweet” (Pt.1- lines 49–50). At their Christmas feast, a stranger enters, a giant, well proportioned, dressed in silk and gold, carrying an axe. He is entirely green. The knight challenges the courtiers to send a hero to meet him, and when they hesitate, he mocks them, suggesting that their glory and courage are illusory. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge, but when the crisis comes a year later, he flinches. He is ashamed, then recovers his courage and offers himself to the deathblow. The Green Knight spares him but Gawain forever wears a green sash, the mark of his fear of death. The members of the court adopt the sash as an acknowledgment of Gawain’s courage, and the frailty of all humanity. The perils of a life in nature—storms, fierce animals, and eventual death—are indeed terrifying, but they do not lead to the utter despair Job experiences. Like the Green

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Knight, Behemoth inspires fear because his prodigious powers so outstrip human capacities. He is like Moby Dick, a dumb presence swimming in the stream of experience. The natural disasters and inbuilt perils he represents are not malicious, not deliberately directed at individuals. Leviathan, God’s final monster, is more potent than the natural disasters represented by Behemoth and the white whale. He is the classic dragon, armored in impermeable scales, resembling a crocodile, but with fiery eyes, breathing smoke and flames. The eyelids of the morning, mentioned in Job’s poem in Chapter 3:9, reappear here as the eyes of the monster—a horizon ringed in deadly fire. “Terror dances before it” (Job 41:22). The dragon churns the very sea of chaos, making it seethe like a boiling pot.4 “When it raises itself up the gods are afraid; at the crashing they are beside themselves” (Job 41:25). The Lord challenges Job: “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?” (Job 41:1). Will the monster negotiate with you? Will it be your servant? “Will you play with it as a bird, or will you put it on a leash for your girls?” (Job 41:5). “No one is so fierce as to dare to draw it up. Who can stand before it: Who can confront it and be safe?” (Job 41:9–10). Leviathan’s moral qualities are even more fearsome than his fiery breath: “His heart is hard as stone.” Just as Pharaoh represents the blind arrogance of power, Leviathan “surveys everything that is lofty: It is king over all that is proud” (Job 40:34). The supreme monster is absolute power, the corrupting appetite for control, issuing in gratuitous violence perpetrated on the helpless. In the Book of Revelations, Leviathan is the great dragon who comes in the end-times to make war on the children of God (Rev. 13–17). One of his helpers is a beast with ten horns and seven heads (Rev. 13 and 17:3–6). The Whore of Babylon rides the back of the fiery beast. While the woman is called Babylon, the seven-headed dragon represents Rome with its seven hills. As the center of tyrannical power in the world of the New Testament, the Roman Empire takes its place with Babylon and Egypt as a symbol of human destructive energy. If the question of the Book of Job is “Why does a good God permit evil?” the partial answer suggested by Leviathan is that humanity, in the exercise of the will to power, is the source of the most intense and terrifying human suffering. If this was true in the days of Pharaoh, it is no less true today. The spiral of violence in our own time seems to accelerate as ideology, ethnicity, and simple greed make victims across all national borders. In the two decades of the Hitler/Stalin era, from 1930 to 1950, forty to fifty million men, women, and children were killed outright. Half were casualties of war: soldiers or civilians killed in bombing raids

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(“collateral damage”). The other half were “victims of deliberate massacre and planned extermination” (Brzezinski 1993, 32). The list goes on: China, Korea, Vietnam; 100,000 in Rwanda; 250,000 in Guatemala; 1,500,000 in the Sudan; hundreds of thousands in Bosnia, El Salvador, Darfur, Iraq, and all the rest. The modern mind makes clear distinctions between social violence and the demonic; but Revelations calls Leviathan a demon: “an ancient serpent who is the Devil and Satan” (Rev. 20:2). The beast is an invisible presence who nevertheless dominates the world, leaving his mark everywhere. Nations reel from a sense of unreality, chaos, non-meaning. Individuals suffer with terrible particularity, with pain so personal and so unwarranted that it is impossible to reconcile with any sane structure of meaning. Leviathan is utterly impersonal; he acts “because he can,” without reason and certainly without reference to the virtue or vice of his victims. Power is the anti-God whom Job suspects and the Comforters deny. God’s apologists, the comforters, live in what Charles Taylor calls “an unchallengeable cosmos of signification” (2003, 342). God is in his place and Job is simply an exile, deservedly barred “from the general feast of meaning.” Job’s confusion reflects a common condition in the post-modern deflation of meaning. He stares into the void, an “intimation of what may be a definitive emptiness, the dawning of the end of the last illusion of significance. It hurts, one may say, in a new way” (Taylor 2003, 342).

“N OW M Y E YES S EE Y OU ” Job, however, steps back from the void. Or rather, he leaps into deep water and finds that he can swim in the same currents that enfold Leviathan. He is carried down alive to alien depths, not mad but taken into another dimension of understanding. In the world of reason, opposites like life and death, good and evil are sharply differentiated. In the visionary world, the hunters and their prey move in a common rhythm, not so much opposed to each other, as in balance. When Job comes back to the surface he says he has seen “things too wonderful for me, which I did not know . . . I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you” (Job 42:5). He is no longer in the dark. Job’s way of knowing has changed, as if he has developed new sensory capacities modifying the old ways of understanding. The terror and splendor of Job’s experience, the “power and urgency” Rudolf Otto (1958) calls the numinous, reshape his perceptive powers.

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To see the face of God is both the final challenge and the ultimate blessing. No one can see him and live, but a few, like Jacob, Moses, and Job see him and are reborn. The terrible vision of Leviathan is, on some level, both self-revelation and a theophany in that it presents us with man, made in God’s image, but corrupted by power. The comforters refuse to see the divine image in Leviathan, but Job’s eyes are opened. This is not to say that God is in any respect evil. He exists in another dimension of meaning—He “formed Leviathan to sport in the sea” (Ps. 104:26), and one day he will slay him as he destroyed Pharaoh. To say God has superior strength is a metaphor describing his greater reality. Good and evil as humans understand them are finally contingent; they will one day cease to exist. Divine wisdom plays freely, past good and evil. Heroes learn detachment from the illusory goals generated by fear and desire—dreams of power and fantasies of omnipotence. The capacity for detachment, implicit in self-sacrifice, allows for a unified vision, past good and evil, past reason and common sense. Melville describes this shift in paradigm: So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason man comes at length to that celestial thought, which to reason is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. (MD ch. 93)

Heroic detachment is not the cold indifference of Leviathan; it bespeaks a capacity for love based on clear vision. Such love confers a freedom to choose another over self—madness in any ego-based system of pleasure and pain. Job ends his interchange with God by saying, “My eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). The verb translated as “despise” is a transitive verb, seldom used in a reflexive formation. “Moreover, the two nouns, usually translated as ‘dust and ashes’ can equally be rendered ‘mortal clay.’ The verse, therefore, may be translated ‘Because of this I shudder with sorrow for mortal clay.’” (Johnson 2002, 21) Job trembles not for himself but for the human condition. God turns to the comforters, saying (in prose), “My wrath is kindled against you . . . for you have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7). He tells them to prepare sacrifices that Job will offer to God: “For I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly.” Retributive justice does not require self-sacrifice, so the comforters prepare for the ritual sacrifice of bulls and rams; Job’s priestly prayer, empowered by his own demonstrated capacity for love, effects a transubstantiation. His suffering stands in for the self-sacrifice of the

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comforters, and God accepts Job’s sacrifice for the forgiveness of their sins. Job becomes the go-el, the living redeemer seen in the flesh. As soon as Job prays for his friends, God restores his fortunes, giving him twice as much as he had before. This last section of the book is a return to the prose frame story. We appear to be back in the world of retributive justice, being asked to believe that restored fortunes and new children make up for all former losses. But certain details and ironies point to the transformative nature of Job’s experience. Reward, on the elementary plane, means having (flocks, servants, children). On Job’s level it means being. He is twice the man he was before. He is twice born. His family and all his friends, presumably including the comforters, provide a feast and surround him with love and sympathy. Their new capacity for love is a response to the expanded vision he brings back to the community. Each brings Job a golden ring from his own treasure, re-integrating Job into the circle of life. The reconciliation scene in Job parallels the reunions of Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers. In Genesis 32, Jacob risks his life to bring his sons home to the Promised Land, even as Esau marches to meet him with hundreds of armed men. The night before Jacob commits to his return he wrestles with God, “a stranger,” until daybreak, winning his new name, Israel. He calls the place Peniel, “for I have seen God face to face and yet my life is preserved” (Gen. 32:30). Esau, who had sworn vengeance for the loss of his birthright, forgives Jacob, runs to meet his brother, and embraces him. Jacob presses gifts upon him, saying, “Truly, to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” Like Job, Jacob loses his old life, contends with God, sees his face, and recognizes God’s face in his brother’s. He is back in the Promised Land, but with a new and intensified life. He is Israel, father of all the tribes. Joseph descends into the pit because of his egotism and a failure of love between brothers. He suffers in Egypt but prevails because of the dreams or visions God sends. Like Job, he sees with his inner eye. When his brothers arrive, seeking to buy food in the famine, he conceals his face from them until he is ready to reveal himself: “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life” (Gen. 45:4–5). Joseph’s suffering leads to the forgiveness of sins and mutual recognition. Like the Suffering Servant, Job, Jacob, and Joseph offer their pain as a vicarious sin offering. In the arena of retributive justice, such an exchange appears as a banking transaction where credits are applied to cover moral debits. In myth, the healing gift grants new insight. The tribal brothers are forced to recognize their own limitations in the

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brother’s suffering face. The effect is to cause them to forgo competition and egoism, to relinquish them; their sins are forgiven, utterly given up. They make the broken circle complete, oppositions are overcome, what was divided is made whole. The resolution of opposites, yin and yang, is an archetypal image pointing to a higher or broader or unified state of consciousness. Such images as the royal marriage, or the reconciliation of brothers, symbolize a wisdom achieved by the acceptance of personal suffering. Ha-Satan accuses others of weakness and sin. The hero withdraws the projection of evil onto others—brothers, dragons, God—and experiences evil as personal suffering, the dark side, recognized and assimilated. Carl Jung speaks of the imperative to “embrace the shadow,” to accept oneself as mortal and flawed (Aion. CW 9 ii,par. 13–19). This clear-eyed view of the whole self is painful but necessary, Jung says, to the emergence of the soul, or true self, symbolized by the reconciled brothers or the union of the bride and groom. On one level of experience, the dragon, Leviathan, is brutal power; on another, he signifies an internal and inevitable trait, a birthmark worn on the soul, a sign of common humanity and the obsession with power. When projected on others, human limitation and contingency are interpreted as moral flaws. The comforters, who have not suffered like Job, focus on the imperfections of others; they have little awareness of their own limitations and consequently insist that Job must be at fault. Job’s descent forces self-examination. He recognizes his mortality; yet, he “maintains his own ways.” His challenge to God, his willingness to risk his life, allows him to see good and evil in a profoundly unitary way. Job’s restoration scene hints at the nature of the change he has undergone. The chief anomaly in the scene is the emphasis on three beautiful daughters, who are not only named but given an inheritance along with their brothers. In the mythic order, the daughters manifest the appearance of the anima figure, the soul or bride. William Blake’s nineteenth-century illustrations for the Book of Job use the daughters, Job’s greatest treasures, as symbols of Sophia, the radiant Wisdom of the Book of Proverbs. S. Foster Damon, a Blake scholar and art historian, interprets the symbolism of the pictures against the background of Blake’s mythic systems in “The Four Zoas,” “Jerusalem,” and other poems (1996). From Blake’s point of view, mythology is universal and essential to understanding, offering insights into the workings of the soul. The countless hero stories are algorhythmic manifestations of an interior process: “The whole drama is enacted in Job’s soul” (Damon 1996, 3). His wife is an aspect of himself: “His children are his creations, his deeds, his joys. The accusing friends are also part of him, as they speak for his submerged sense of guilt. His devil

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is the Accuser within, and even his God is his own creation, his own ideal, made in his image, his selfhood, and not the True God at all” (Damon 1996, 3). In Blake’s first illustration we see Job and his family seated, praying from a book Job holds. Above, in the heavens, God sits with an open book on his knees. In Blake’s symbol system, the book is the Law. Job, “blameless and upright,” plays life “by the book.” He is confident of his own virtue but very careful to dot all the I’s and cross the T’s. He seeks control, making burnt offerings for all his children, just in case they have “sinned and cursed God in their hearts” (Job 1:5). These details hint at the hubris of Job’s initial condition. His need to control is the mark of Leviathan, a sign of universal human limitations; the petty fears and desires obscuring his vision are inevitable in the adult ego. The cleansing process, the stripping away of mental constrictions, is intrinsically painful. In Blake’s last illustration, Job and all his family stand against the background of a rising sun, making music together. The daughters carry symbols of poetry, music, and painting. Job’s ordeal carries him from the limited world of words, the Book, to the vast harmonies articulated by the arts. The characters and events of the Book of Job represent an interior passage from innocence through the fallen world of experience to the messianic Jerusalem of full awareness.

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ne of the strongest theological movements of the twentieth century was the effort to “demythologize” the three-story universe of biblical literalism. Scholars such as Rudolf Bultmann sought to pare away the angels and demons in search of an existential core, something more intelligible to modern thought. He sought to spare Christians the dilemma of “sacrificing” their intellects “in order to accept what we cannot sincerely consider true” (2004, 17). A literary approach to the Bible assumes that symbols are meanings; it will not do to simply peel away the cherubs. The texts of the Hebrew Scriptures are knit together by symbol; the motifs of firstborn sons, barren wives, and trickster figures interact in an expansive universe of cognates. Midrash, the ancient system of biblical interpretation, holds that every word of scripture is intrinsic to its meaning. Every iteration of “water” or “bread” is bound to the others. Every seven and twelve resonates with its antecedents. The New Testament is a meditation or a midrash on the Hebrew Scriptures. Symbol is the native language of the Bible; neither literalism nor iconoclasm provides a good translation. Literalists do not care much about the reflecting mythic images because they focus on “the facts,” on the Bible’s claims to historical truth. While historical-critical studies recognize the numerous links between symbols they typically content themselves with finding and listing the New Testament references to figures in the Hebrew Scriptures. Merely cataloguing mythemes is like counting messages while neglecting to read them. The great myth readers of the late twentieth century—Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, Paul Ricoeur, and others—were first buried under a wave of structuralist studies—diagrammatic representations of narrative (A. J. Greimas, etc.). A wave of hostile poststructuralism followed. Some strains

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of poststructuralism are iconoclastic, viewing all patterns as coercive “master plans.” Such critics misread symbol patterns by confusing the organic forms of myth with the mathematical structures of logos. One of the obstacles to understanding the linked images of scripture arose in the second century CE. A movement called “supersessionism” appeared in some Christian circles, claiming that the New Testament had supplanted or displaced the Hebrew Scriptures. These claims are essentially based on a literalization of apocalyptic images in some of the epistles and in many other noncanonical documents of the times. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, for example, the writer looks forward to the second coming of Christ: “Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who approach” (Heb. 10:1). In the supersessionist view, the images of the New Testament supersede the older images, making them redundant. Adam, for instance, is seen as a “type” of Christ, who is the “second Adam,” or “antitype.” The binding of Isaac is seen as foreshadowing the crucifixion. The parallels among the images of Adam, Isaac, and Christ are clear enough. But supersessionist typology “colonizes” the Hebrew symbols, by claiming to “fulfill” its images, suggesting that the Hebrew types are incomplete without Christian antitypes. The New Testament figures, the antitypes, are the “real thing,” while the patriarchal images are marginalized as foreshadowings.1 The supersessionists were controversial in their own day, since the New Testament, for all its polemics against the Jewish leadership, is never explicitly supersessionist. The writers of the New Testament, all Jewish, viewed their own work as a commentary, not a replacement for the Hebrew Scriptures. The evangelists considered the Septuagint text of the Tanakah, in common use in the temple at the time of Christ, as primary. It was the Bible, and their writings were intended to link the life and thought of Jesus to the Holy Scriptures of Israel. The legitimacy of Christian writings derived in part from their intimate relationship with the Torah. It was not until the end of the second century that Paul’s letters and the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were recognized as the core of what would become the New Testament. The apocalyptic movement ebbed during the centuries that passed before the canon was firmly established. Gradually, during that long, uneven process, the New Testament assumed the status of Bible among Christians. Supersessionist texts, such as “The Epistle of Barnabas,” were excluded from the canon. Marcion was declared a heretic for rejecting the Old Testament. Gnostic

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and Manichean sects were hostile to the Hebrew Scriptures, but the early church insisted on their sacred origin. Doubtless there are Christians today, especially those of the current apocalyptic movement, who maintain the supersessionist position, but they are tone-deaf to symbolism. They imagine that the Gospel images compete with Old Testament symbols, like warring brothers. But in mythic systems, images intensify and realize each other, adding nuances and dimensions of meaning. The linked images—tyrants, angels, twins— channel the flow of meaning, producing an organic tissue of symbols, enriched and laden with multiple meanings. In a larger sense, biblical images are a subset of a ubiquitous pattern of analogous images in narrative. There is no “last word,” no final paramount meaning as long as stories continue to be told. The Christian doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ offers a parallel insight: the risen Christ will not be complete until the last hero rises on the Easter morning of the apocalypse. In the meantime, the revelation goes on. Obviously, Christians and Jews do not see the New Testament in the same way (see Dabru Emet, 2000). Neither do Catholics and Protestants, liberals and literalists. But there is no need to engage in squabbles about image systems. Thinking about linked symbols as literary devices rather than theological weapons opens the way to understanding a symbolic method central to the entire Holy Scriptures. The New Testament is an interpretive locus based on the Messianic expectations of Israel at the time of Christ. Its focus is neither Christianity nor Judaism but the Kingdom of which Jesus spoke. The Gospels emphasize the continuity of the New Testament with the Hebrew Scriptures but anticipate a final revelation, a messianic vision fulfilling all the promises of the prophets. Old Testament narrative presents an evolving and developing conception of the divine presence. The story begins in the innocent garden of tribal life; it follows the heroic patriarchal passage through the wasteland, Moses’ trip to the mountaintop and the decline reported by the prophets. At each step, the terms of the covenant appear from a different perspective. At the time of Jesus, messianic hopes were high because the historical situation was so desperate. Roman occupation had reduced Israel to beggary and fractured the social and religious hierarchy into hostile segments. The Sadducees were an elite group, Hellenized and in league with the Romans. The Pharisees were a small middle class, supporting Torah and the temple traditions. The Essenes, ascetic, celibate, messianic, were scornful of both groups. Zealots agitated for revolt against Rome. A large diaspora community existed already in such cities as Antioch and Alexandria. The vast majority of Israelites, the Am-Haretz, lived in dire poverty

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and ignorance of the law. Most of Jesus’ supporters were from this segment. Jesus, of course, was not a Christian but a Jew. So were all of his close followers. For fifty or sixty years after the death of Christ, they worshipped in the temple or in the synagogues. They were one more contentious, messianic group of struggling Jews. The land was full of beggars, day laborers, slaves, magicians, traveling healers, and would-be messiahs. Jesus was born into this fractured world, bereft of tribal ties, estranged from the ruling classes. His followers were mostly poor, self-selected, not bound to his cause by blood or hope for gain. In 70 CE, the Zealots led a revolt against Rome, and the legions destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, ending Judaism as it had been during the development of scripture. Erich Fromm describes the subsequent rabbinic Judaism as “a religion without a temple, priests or dogma.” It focused on the Law as a guide to “right actions in all areas of life” (1996, 108). Jesus’ followers lived in small communities, sharing their goods with each other on the tribal model. Until Constantine made Christianity Rome’s official religion, it was perceived as an outlaw cult. Virtually all the popes in the early centuries were martyred. In their purest forms, Judaism and Christianity resist the power of the state and extend compassion to the powerless, the widows and orphans. The New Testament is much shorter than the Hebrew Scriptures, about one-third the length. It is composed of twenty-seven documents, written in Greek, like the Septuagint translation of the Bible in use in the temple at the time of Jesus. The four Gospels (Gospel, “Evangelion” in Greek, means “good news”) comprising about forty percent of the New Testament, were written down between 66 and 100 CE. Jesus died between 30 and 33 CE. For about forty years, the kerygma, or teachings, were passed on in an oral tradition of preaching. Jesus and his followers spoke Aramaic, a dialect of Hebrew. The books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, called the synoptic Gospels (synoptic means “seen together”) are much alike. Mark’s, the shortest, is thought to have been the first composed and was a model for Matthew and Luke. Source criticism postulates a second source, called “Q,” used by Matthew and Luke. “Q,” from German Quelle, or source, is thought to have been a written record of Jesus’ sayings and parables. John’s gospel, written last, in the ’90s, is traditionally ascribed to one of Jesus’ apostles, the “beloved one,” or to a member of John’s community. It is deeply meditative, emphasizing Jesus’ role as the Word of God, a divine self-revelation, rendering the transcendent divinity intelligible to humanity. Paul’s letters, written beginning in about the year 50, are the earliest New Testament documents. Paul says little about Jesus’ life and teachings but focuses on his death, resurrection, and messianic second coming. Paul

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was a Pharisee, initially deeply opposed to the Christian movement. He never met Jesus, but he experienced a vision and devoted himself to converting the gentiles to the worship of the Messianic Christ. The New Testament contains a number of other epistles by unknown authors, a history of the early Church, called the Acts of the Apostles, and the Book of Revelations, or the Apocalypse. Our focus will be on Jesus’ sayings and on the narrative archetypes of the Gospel stories. New Testament imagery is dramatic, its aphorisms paradoxical. Matthew’s nativity narrative provides good examples of typology suggesting both continuity and heightened intensity. In Chapter 1, Matthew provides a “genealogy of Jesus the Messiah [the Christ or anointed one], the son of David, the son of Abraham.” He divides the genealogy into three sections, each with fourteen generations. The number fourteen is associated with David through gemetria, or number symbolism (see Fideler [1993] or Lawlor [1898]). The Hebrew letter D has the numerical value of four (as X means ten in Roman numerals) V means six. The consonants DVD add up to fourteen, David’s number. By devising a genealogy of three units, each with fourteen ancestors, Matthew implies that Christ (3 ǂ 14) is a triple-strength distillation of David’s name and identity. The genealogy is odd, however, in that it mentions women, who are not usually included in genealogical charts. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, Jesus’ maternal ancestors, are sexually suspect; Tamar seduced Judah and bore twins (Gen. 38). Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute who helped Joshua conquer the Promised Land (Josh. 2). Ruth, a widowed convert to Judaism, seduced Boaz and married him (Ruth 3–4). Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife, bore David two sons (2 Sam. 11–12). The inclusion of the four women tugs at the genealogical line, pulling it off the expected course. Frederick Greenspahn’s study of sibling displacement in the Hebrew Scriptures, When Brothers Dwell Together (1994), comments on the Bible’s predilection for upsetting standard expectations. Things do not seem to go as one might suppose they will. The New Testament revels in “holy surprises,” revealing a puzzling proclivity for sinners and aliens. The paradox is summed up in the formula “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.” Immediately after the genealogy, Matthew tells us about Mary’s virginal pregnancy. She is “found to be with child from the Holy Spirit,” but an angel tells her fiancé, Joseph, to protect her and the child, Jesus (Hebrew Joshua, or Yeshua, “The Lord Saves”). All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the Prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, /And they shall name him Emmanuel (God is with Us)” (Is 7:14). The quote promising a virgin conception

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was understood in a messianic context. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were all married to beloved but infertile wives. God provided miraculous pregnancies for the matriarchs as a lead-up to the establishment of the Covenant. For the Messiah, who will usher in a new age, a virgin gives birth. Again, an extension and heightening of metaphor. Luke’s account describes the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary. “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” When he tells her that she is to bear a child, she asks how this can be since she is a virgin. Like Sarai, when told that she will conceive in spite of her advanced age, Mary questions the messenger. Gabriel responds: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you.” Her son will be called the son of the Most High and will reign from the throne of David. Mary replies, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Jesus will be “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:32). Mary’s hymn, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), echoes Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1–10. Hannah, the prophet Samuel’s mother, had been barren; when she bears Samuel she gives thanks to God, who will make the last come first, bringing down the powerful from their thrones, and raising up the lowly: “The bows of the mighty aare broken, but the feeble gird on strength” (1 Sam. 2:4). Every detail of the infancy narrative is carefully related to material in the Hebrew Scriptures. There are no stray images or unintegrated details in the Gospels. Current scholarly editions of the Bible reveal hundreds of connections between the two texts. Scholars count fifty-seven quotes and 160 allusions in the last five chapters of Mark alone. The Book of Revelations (404 verses long), refers to the Septuagint translation at least 275 times. Although the immediate typological application of the Gospel accounts of the virgin birth is to the Hebrew Scriptures, sacred literature, worldwide, contains many accounts of virgin birth. Siddhartha Goutoma, the Buddha, was born of the virgin Maya. Maya means something like “vanity” in Ecclesiastes, illusion or the phenomenal world. It is reality “seen in its misleading manyness rather than its unity” (Gentz 1986, 671). When Siddhartha is made flesh, light spreads though all the worlds, the blind see and the deaf hear (Leeming 1998, 229). The Aztec demigod, Quetzalcoatl, is conceived when the father god, coming as Morning, breathes on the virgin Chimalmon. As in the case of Jesus, the child is fathered by breath, or spirit, and is associated with the dawn of new light. The Bantu hero, Lituoline, is born into a wasteland, where everyone but one woman, his virgin mother, has been devoured by a monster. When the hero learns

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what has happened to the people, he attacks the monster with a knife, is swallowed up, and destroys the beast from within. The hero goes down into darkness and returns, pulling the lost people into the light (Leeming 1998, 234). Joseph Campbell’s chapter on virgin birth (1968, 297–315) describes miraculous conceptions from all parts of the world—Finland, Rhodesia, India. Jove descends “as a bull, a swan, a shower of gold. Any leaf accidentally swallowed, any nut, or even the breath of a breeze may be enough to fertilize the ready womb” (Campbell 1968, 311). Fray Pedro Simon, a seventeenth-century missionary in Columbia, found native versions of the story of the Incarnation and concluded that “the devil himself must be throwing up mockeries” of Christian teaching (Campbell 1968, 309). The question is not did all these things “really happen” but what do the images mean? In The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, Erich Neumann associates the Virgin Mother with Sophia, Wisdom—Jahweh’s Word or creative matrix (1963, 325). Matter is shaped by form and so becomes intelligible. The mind codifies the raw material of sense experience before it can be interpreted. The virgin matrix is “a creative principle independent of the personal man,” not of the same order as sense experience. Mater Mary is the material world, informed by spirit, bringing new life and light. Her child, the Word of God, represents consciousness rising from darkness. His appearance signals the emergence of a new level of understanding. He makes the spirit intelligible, translating the divine Word into corporeal symbol. As the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, the Son is “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Heb. 1:3), rendered in anthropomorphic terms and thus assimilable. The Word “sustains all things,” generating being in a perpetual creative act, as the sun generates light. Mary’s role incorporates the range of women’s archetypal representation. She is perpetually virgin; her womb is a sacred vessel, like the holy grail, set aside from common use. At the same time, she is the perennial mother, quick with divine life. She is the Mother of Sorrows: “a sword will pierce [her] soul” (Luke 2:35), and yet, like Sophia, she is God’s “daily delight, rejoicing before him always” (Prov. 8:30). The sacred child is often born during the darkest times, as Moses was conceived while Pharaoh was destroying the Hebrew boys. (In the Christian calendar, the birth of Jesus was set to coincide with the winter equinox, the shortest, darkest day of the year.) The child must escape dangerous male forces, representing the repressive status quo (Oedipus, Zoroaster, Sigurd, Water Pot Boy of the Tewa Indians; Leeming 1998, 115). Matthew 2 begins with the story of Herod, who, like Pharaoh, kills

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the baby boys of the Israelites. Joseph is told to flee to Egypt with the mother and child to fulfill the prophecy “Out of Egypt I have called my son,” linking Jesus to the stories of Joseph and Moses, who led the Israelites to the Promised Land. If we were to look at every typological reference in the New Testament, we would bog down in a task that has been admirably done by others. Any scholarly edition of the Bible devotes voluminous footnotes to the intertestamental references. Instead, I would rather examine one representative incident, the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman (John 4) to illustrate how even simple, relatively unimportant details open up rich interpretive patterns. Gospel meanings are not in the “facts” of the stories but in their symbolic development. Jesus is resting by Jacob’s well in Samaria, when a woman appears to draw water. He surprises her by asking for a drink. “How is it,” she asks, “that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” The text notes parenthetically “Jews do not share things in common with the Samaritans.” The Samaritans were a mixed group, believed to be descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel or Ishmael and Esau. The Jews regarded them as apostates and rejected them. Jesus replies that if the woman knew him, she would ask him for a drink, and he would give her “living water.” The phrase, meaning spring water as opposed to standing water, appears in Jeremiah 2:13 in the context of God’s search for Israel, the faithless wife. The people “have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” The Samaritan woman is unimpressed by Jesus’ offer of living water; she notes that the well is deep and Jesus has no bucket. He replies that all who drink from the well will thirst again. “The water that I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). She understands him literally and wants some of that magic water. Jesus tells her to come back with her husband. “I have no husband,” she replies. “You are right,” Jesus says, “You have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband.” This is a jeer, a comment on the religious infidelities of the Samaritans, and a stereotype about promiscuous foreign women. It is also a glance back at Jeremiah’s critique of Israel. The woman acknowledges the truth of Jesus’ remarks about her: “Sir, I see you are a prophet”; but she defends the religious practices of her people: “Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is Jerusalem.” Jesus’ response is: Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not

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know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth . . . God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. (John 4:21–24)

The woman recognizes that Jesus is speaking of messianic times. When the messiah comes, she says, “He will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus replies, “I am he.” The verb “to be” is especially linked to Yahweh’s name, “I Am Who I Am.” At critical moments of revelation Jesus appropriates the verb in a simple form, “I am he,” or “I am the way, the truth, the life.” The image of living water is a symbol of transformation from a stagnant, befouled element to an intense rush of life bubbling up from a spiritual source. Jesus offers his life to the woman in the context of Jeremiah’s lament over the faithless bride. Just as Isaac, Jacob, and Moses find their spotless wives at wells in the desert, so, in these messianic times, Jesus finds his pagan bride at Jacob’s well and saves her from the wasteland. At first she understands him literally, and so misunderstands him. She is not alone. When his disciples appear, they offer Jesus food, which he rejects, saying, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” The disciples are also literalists and wonder who brought him food. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me.” Jesus’ relationship with his disciples is one long misunderstanding. They ask, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?” He replies with a wry allusion to Isaiah; “You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive” (Matt. 13:10). The people’s hearts have grown hard, like Pharaoh’s; they do not hear because they choose not to. In Matthew 13:34, “Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable, he told them nothing.” He “proclaims what has been hidden from the foundations of the world,” but no one understands. Until after his death the disciples persist in literalizing, missing his point every time. On several other occasions, Jesus uses water as a symbol of interior transformation, the passage from one plane to another. John’s account of Jesus’ first miracle, at a wedding in Cana, turns on transformation (John 2). Weddings, like bar mitzvahs and baptisms, are liminal events, initiation rites, celebrating the achievement of new identities. In Jesus’ time, weddings served as metaphors for the arrival of the messiah. At the wedding in Cana, the hosts run out of wine. Jesus’ mother, Mary, asks for his help. Jesus balks, saying, “My hour has not yet come” (the messianic hour). But he relents and asks the servants to fill six large stone water jars, used for ritual purification. When the steward tastes the water it has become wine. He exclaims, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine

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after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus has taken ordinary water, from an ordinary celebration and intensified it, given it intoxicating power. The Kingdom is breaking into the ordinary world. The wedding imagery looks back to the Song of Songs, where Solomon loves his bride, Israel, with “love stronger than death.” In the last book of the New Testament, Revelations, the risen Christ will save the captive princess and marry her. Humanity will be transformed into the bride of Christ. John is careful in his description of the Cana events, to note that this is a “sign” from Jesus, a semeia, a seed of revelation. In another liminal ceremony, Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus emerges from the waters of the Jordan just as the heavens are torn apart and the spirit descends on him like a dove (Mark 1:9–11). John, a mentor figure, remarks to the crowd, “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” The passage under the waters signifies death, mortality. Jesus rises, animated by the divine spirit. “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” The well-known story of the woman called Mary Magdalene2 (Luke 7:36) also hinges on water as transformation imagery. Jesus is dining at the house of a Pharisee when the woman, a public sinner, enters in tears. She bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, and anoints them with precious oil. The Pharisee is put off by the display and thinks that if Jesus were really a prophet he would know what kind of woman she is and would rebuff her. Jesus guesses his thought and uses the incident to discuss the nature of sin and redemption. He asks, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house, but you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears.” The virtuous host has neglected commonplace courtesies, while the woman transmutes the ordinary cleansing water into her tears, distilled from love and sorrow. “She has shown great love.” The living waters gush up in her to eternal life. Jesus says, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” The Last Supper is a Passover meal marking another liminal event, the exodus from slavery and death to life (Luke 22:15–20). Jesus is eager to share a meal with his disciples, for he will not again “drink of the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom of God comes.” He takes a cup of wine and prays over it. “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” As the water at the Samaritan well is replaced by the fountain of living water, and the water at Cana becomes wine, this wine becomes the sacred blood, life poured out in sacrifice. In John’s account of the crucifixion, a soldier pierces Jesus’ side and blood and water pour out (John 19:34). The Book of Revelations (22:1) describes “the river of the water

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of life, bright as crystal,” flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb in the new Jerusalem. The heavenly city represents a restoration of the Garden of Eden where four rivers flow. These images of transformation—and many more, in the Bible and in numberless initiation rites—are intertwined. The Samaritan at the well, Magdalene’s tears, the wedding wine at Cana, the cup of the covenant—all are threads in a complex web of meaning. Every iteration of the image is bound to all the others.

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ohn’s gospel, the last written, skips the nativity narrative and begins with a meditation on the role of Jesus in the cosmos: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

John’s formulation of Jesus as the Word is related to two very different conceptions of formal structure. One is the logos of the Stoic philosophers, the rational order, the abstract principles of logic and mathematics grounding the workings of the universe. In the Greek model, logos is a set of universal rules shaping matter into a world of discrete objects, fixed in time, moving in predictable rotation. It is more or less a match for the principles of Newtonian physics. John was certainly aware of the Greek formulations of matter and form. Paul, in about 50 CE was already debating the Stoics on these matters (Acts 17) and he knew of the work of Philo Judaeus, a Hellenized Jew who sought to reconcile Greek philosophy with Hebrew Scriptures. In Hebrew Wisdom literature, the formal principle is mythos, or symbolic language, registering a shifting world of innumerable images, moving in parallel formations. Jahweh’s name, “I am who I am,” is a verb, an ongoing activity perpetually generating the universe in an expressive gesture. In Genesis, God creates with his Word. He speaks the cosmos into existence the way a singer makes a song. His Word—Wisdom or Sophia— is the formal element, like the melody ordering the notes, shaping the vast energy of the divine source. Every created thing is, in essence, a harmonic

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vibration, part of the music, part of a prolific meaning. The world of the Greek logos operates by changeless rules, marching from its beginning to its inevitable end. In the world of Wisdom, playing before God (Prov. 8:30), the dance of reality is always “Now,” always sustained and held together by the Word, but subject to improvisation and unexpected change. Mythos produces hosts of heroes, mentors, dragons—related, but unique. Its order is less like physics and more like DNA, directing the development of tissue to produce an infinity of living shapes. The truth of logos is the correspondence between a theory or proposition, and the testable “facts on the ground.” Mythos, in all its expressions—music, poetry, dance— is intelligible and beautiful, reflecting an evolution of consciousness, “rising spires of form,” rooted in instinctive awareness and expressed in universally recognized symbols. John’s gospel continues: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us” (1:14). To be intelligible, the form must be anthropomorphized. The divine order manifests itself to human consciousness as a living, organic order. It is lived out, understood in broad and various and loving ways. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Wisdom, the Word, is humanized: The Lord created me at the beginning of his work The first of his acts of long ago . . . When he established the heavens I was there . . . When he marked out the foundations of the earth Then I was beside him, like a master workman, And I was daily his delight, rejoicing [or playing, or dancing] Before him always. (Prov. 8:22–30)

Although John’s depiction of the Word is striking in its intensity, it is not unique in New Testament descriptions of Jesus as the Word or ordering principle. The Epistle to the Colossians 1:17 says he is “before all things, and in him all things hold together.” In Hebrews 1:30, he is called “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.” When the Word dwelled or “pitched his tent among us,” the meaning and range of the hero myth changed. The sequential symbols (the word, or format) remained the same, but the command to follow the journey was extended past the heroes, kings, and prophets of the ancient world to include everyone as a potential traveler. The journey is to be interiorized, recognized as the pattern for internal development. Even the most humble have a role to play in realizing their own souls and generating the Kingdom. Insofar as God is intelligible to humanity it is as the Word, the

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developing pattern we discern in symbolic language and in our own lives. Because we are human beings and cannot know the way angels and ants know, the revelation must come in the flesh. Not in words only, but in the consequences of our own choices and the experience of suffering. Jesus’ public ministry was marked by miracles, parables, and paradoxes. All point to the arrival of the Kingdom of God. At the time of Christ, eschatological expectations were intense. Jesus’ followers expected him to return to earth and initiate a new age; for many believers today, the Kingdom is identified with the Apocalypse. Since the Gospels sometimes refer to the “Kingdom of Heaven,” others think of the Kingdom as synonymous with Heaven, the afterlife of the saved. Jesus tells us in Luke 17:20, “The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ for, in fact, the Kingdom of God is among you” or “within you.” It is a surprising treasure, like a pearl of great price, but it also grows quietly and unobtrusively, like a mustard seed or like yeast leavening dough. Stephen Harris notes that the images of pearls, buried treasures, lost coins, “highlight a gradual and private process on the part of individuals. In parables of this kind, a solitary figure—a widow, a lone merchant, a shepherd—takes time to focus on the process of discovery” (441). In this sense, the Kingdom is a form of wisdom, an interior reality, partially realized among us now. Yet Jesus’ emphasis on social justice implies a concrete political and economic aspect of the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ miracles, long understood literally, are primarily symbolic gestures pointing to the Kingdom, to the advent of a new order of life. I do not mean, by emphasizing the symbolic value, that no one was cured or fed, but that the healings and other marvels are symbols of profound internal changes in Jesus’ followers. Mark, the first Gospel writer (66–70 CE), presents many miracle stories and emphasizes their importance in attracting followers. John, the last evangelist, writing between 90 and 95, mentions few miracles and refers to them as “signs”—symbols pointing beyond themselves. When Jesus begins his public ministry he alludes to one of Isaiah’s “messianic visions” (Is. 61:1–3): The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives And recovery of sight to the blind To let the oppressed go free. (Luke 4:18–19)

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One of the signs of the Messiah was to be his power to heal and empower the poor and sick. Jesus attributes his many healings to the faith of the patient. Just as Mary Magdalene was “saved by her faith,” so the healings depend on the faith of the patient. Faith here seems to mean a choice to turn away from the expectations of ordinary life by means of repenting (re-pense) or re-thinking. Northrop Frye uses the Greek word metanoia: “Translated ‘repentance’ by the AV, which suggests a moralized inhibition of the ‘stop doing everything you want to do’ variety. What the word primarily means, however, is change of outlook or spiritual metamorphosis, an enlarged vision of the dimensions of human life” (Frye 1982, 130). Dante uses the Italian word riconocenza (re-cognition) for this same expansion of understanding. In the messianic age, the limits of normality will not apply; people are to be liberated from the bondage of their obsessions and allowed freedom of movement, both physical, mental, and spiritual. When the limits of oppressive power and the self-inflicted bonds of narcissism fall away, new capacities for understanding emerge. People are free to see themselves truly and to love what they see. The lame stand up and walk. In an age like Jesus’, when religious healers flourished, the power of psychosomatic forces must have been powerful indeed. Jesus emphasized that he did not cure, but that the sick saved themselves through recognizing their sins and giving them up (for-giveness). Matthew 9 reports an instance in which Jesus blesses a paralyzed man, saying, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.” Some scribes accuse Jesus of blasphemy, to which he responds, “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk?’” To illustrate his point he then orders the paralytic to pick up his bed and walk home, which he does. Jesus’ point is that healings are primarily internal matters. The onlookers at the miracles expect physical marvels, but Jesus looks for internal change. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus goes to his hometown where the locals reject him. “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?” Jesus responds: “‘Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin and in their own house.’ And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief” (Mark 6:1–5). Jesus’ neighbors see him only in stereotypical terms of status. They don’t know Jesus or themselves. Faith or belief starts, in the Kingdom, with selfrecognition. Social roles, the drives for power and prestige make it very difficult, especially for successful people, to see their own limitations.

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Cripples and public sinners are more likely to be aware of their mortality. Healing begins with rethinking and admitting personal limitation and fragility. John’s account of the miracle of the loaves and fishes (John 6. 1–15) offers Jesus’ own reflections on people’s responses to his miracles. A large crowd has followed Jesus up a mountain, and there is not enough food to feed them. A boy has five loaves of bread and two fish, but that appears to be all there is. Jesus makes the crowd sit down, prays over the loaves, as he would pray over the bread at the last supper, and then distributes enough food to feed the entire crowd. People are so impressed that they try to seize him to make him king, but he escapes. When they catch up with him again (John 6:25), Jesus rebukes them: “You are looking for me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” The crowd asks him to prove that he is the Messiah by repeating the miracle of Moses’ manna in the desert. Jesus replies, in an allusion to Isaiah, that it is the Father who gives the bread of life. Thus says the Lord: All you who are thirsty, come to the water! You who have no money, come, receive grain and eat; Come without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk! Why spend your money for what is not bread; your wages for what fails to satisfy? (Is. 55:1–3)

Jesus says that the Lord promises real bread, that is, life and a renewal of the everlasting covenant. Jesus tells the crowd that “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” (John 6:33) Like the Samaritan woman who at first understands literally and asks for the water of life, the crowd says, “Sir, give us that bread always.” He replies, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35). “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died . . . I am the living bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:47). His followers will assimilate the meaning of his sacrifice, will follow him on the archetypal Way, and become themselves the bread of life. This is indeed the multiplication of the loaves. The miracle that so impresses the crowd is entirely secondary to the symbolic truths it represents.

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PARABLES Ordinary parables are simple stories, using familiar images, moving by analogy from commonplace truths to more abstract matters. Shepherds care for their sheep as God cares for his people. But the Greek parabola, on which the biblical term is based, describes neither a straight line to the truth nor a perfect circle. It is off-center, a curveball. Jesus’ parables are like Zen koans, riddles, challenging common sense. C. H. Dodd says that they “tease” readers into active thought. He is alluding to John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the silent form of the urn “dost tease us out of thought as does eternity” (Keats 2000, 851). The meaning of the urn lies just past the normal bounds of time and speech. So do the meanings of the parables. In spite of their prosaic surfaces and their consistent evocation of everyday events, Jesus’ parables tease us to explore the invisible Kingdom. Matthew’s parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1–15) picks up on Isaiah’s metaphor of God’s vineyard (Is. 5:1–7), but, as Joachim Jeremias points out, Jesus develops it in a new way (1963a, 138–39). Jeremias contrasts the parable to a similar story contained in the Jerusalem Talmud. In Matthew’s version, the Kingdom of Heaven is compared with a vineyard ready to be harvested. The owner agrees to pay a denarius apiece to each of a group of workers as a standard day’s wage. Later in the day the owner hires another group of workers without specifying a wage. Still later, he hires more workers. At the end of the day, he gives each man a denarius. The workers first hired complain that they have been treated unfairly, relative to the latecomers. The owner tells them that he has fulfilled his agreement with them and that, furthermore, he is “free to do as [he] pleases with [his] money.” The rabbinical parallel occurs in a funeral sermon preached in the fourth century CE (Jeremias 1963a, 138–39). A distinguished young rabbi, Bun bar Hijja, died unexpectedly. One of his former teachers, Rabbi Z’era, told the following parable as his funeral. There was, he said, a king who hired a number of workers for his vineyard at the beginning of the day. When two hours had gone by, the king inspected the work and then singled out one laborer who had worked with great skill and energy. The king took that man by the hand and walked with him down the fields until the end of the day. He then paid each laborer the same amount. The workers complained, “We have worked the whole day, and this man only two hours, yet you have paid him the full day’s wages.” The king’s answer was, “I have not wronged you; this laborer has done more in two hours than you have done in the whole day.” The funeral oration ended, “So likewise

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has Rabbi Bun bar Hijj accomplished more in his short life of twenty-eight years than many a gray haired scholar in a hundred years. Therefore, after so brief a span of labor, God has taken him by the hand and gathered him to himself.” Jeremias points out that despite the many similarities in the two parables, they teach two very different lessons. In the rabbinical version, the worker who served the shortest time actually earned his reward by producing more satisfactory work than the other laborers. In Jesus’ parable, the latecomers can show no claim to equal merit with the other laborers. The point is that God rewards all the workers bountifully simply because he chooses to. In a similar contrast, Jeramias points to a version of the parable of the Good Shepherd in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (1963, 134). The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine sheep to find the lost one. When the exhausted shepherd finds the lost sheep, he embraces it saying, “I love thee more than the ninety-nine.” The reason he loves this creature best is that it is the largest and most valuable of all the flock. Luke 15:15 and Matthew 18:14 make it clear that their lost sheep is one of the “little ones” of the flock and that the shepherd’s quest is not motivated by prudential self-interest; on the contrary, the shepherd risks the flock, leaving the ninety-nine untended while searching for the lost sheep. Only a most eccentric shepherd would abandon the flock to its own devices while he searched for the least among them. Luke’s account ends when the rejoicing shepherd calls his friends together to celebrate: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” This parable is a curveball of the first order. In the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9–14), we are told that Jesus addresses his words to “those who believe in their own self-righteousness while holding everyone else in contempt.” The Pharisee prays: “I give you thanks, O God, that I am not like the rest of men— thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” He goes on to say he fasts twice a week and tithes. His prayer is related to a number of other prayers that have come down in Talmudic tradition, all of which emphasize the blessing of being among the virtuous servants of the Lord: I thank thee, O Lord, my God, that thou hast given me my lot with those who sit in the seat of learning, and not with those who sit at the street-corners; for I am early to work, and they are early to work; I am early to work on the words of the Torah, and they are early to work on things of no moment. I weary myself, and they weary themselves; I weary myself and

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profit thereby, while they weary themselves to no profit. I run and they run; I run towards the life of the Age to Come, and they run toward the pit of destruction. (Jeremias 1963a, 142)

The Pharisee in Luke’s gospel mentions his good deeds, which go beyond those demanded by the law and gives thanks to God. He does not petition God for favors. Luke’s Pharisee is contrasted with a tax collector, a representative of a class regarded as little better than criminal. He is evidently in despair, not daring to approach the altar or even to raise his hands and eyes to God. His situation is hopeless, since the Law would require him to give up his sinful occupation and all his ill-gotten gains to his victims—clearly an almost impossible burden. He calls out, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” but he shows no signs of amendment. Yet Jesus tells us that “This man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” His listeners must have been nonplussed by this apparent breach of all justifiable expectations. A reasonable person might well ask what had the Pharisee done to deserve condemnation? How has the sinner changed his life that he should be forgiven? Perhaps an examination of changing expectations of reward and punishment will clarify the paradox. Pharaoh and slavery represent the lowest level of expectation. Slaves exist outside all mechanisms of compensation. They must do what they are made to do, without reference to reward, though punishment is an ever-present eventuality. The absolute power inherent in slavery generates a capricious, arbitrary, impersonal world. The Law counters slavery, creating a society of mutual consent and equal application of rules. In such a system, people can reasonably expect to receive something in return for their work, their money, their time. In the world of retributive justice, fair exchange is the rule, and, better, a fair profit is the hope. The chief defect in this system is that it is too good for many people. They cannot live up to the standards of fair exchange, but, like Pharaoh, are ego driven to control what they have not earned. Such people are self-enslaved or rather are captives of their obsessions with gain and control. Misers do not need money, but they cannot stop trying to amass more. They can’t get enough of what they don’t really need or even want. Obsessional appetites for gain can skew the system of Law, throwing it out of balance, making it dysfunctional. In the world of slavery, people have little control over their destinies, so they place great emphasis on fate or luck. As Darrin McMahon notes in Happiness: A History (2006), the modern words for happiness go back to Indo-European words for fate; Happ, Middle English for “chance,

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fortune, what happens in the world.” Such words as “happenstance,” “haphazard,” “hapless,” and “perhaps” reflect the element of chance that happ connotes (Lanchester 2006, 78). The Law introduces the idea of just deserts, fair apportionment of reward and punishment. It brings responsibility and confers a measure of control over one’s fate, an expectation of getting what one deserves. As the Book of Job shows, life does not always play by the rules. The parables reveal the other face of God’s justice— unearned mercy for sinners. Job wonders why the innocent suffer, and the parables ask why sinners are forgiven. Getting what we deserve is something we all think we want, and certainly, in the arithmetic of social justice, fair play is an undeniable good. What, then, are we to make of these stories of kings who give their money away and shepherds who risk the safety of the flock for the smallest sheep? Jesus is talking about the condition or activity called “Grace”—giving things away, free, without thought of compensation. God doesn’t need anything, so it is easy enough for him to give it all away. When grace is ascribed to people, it is defined as a “share in God’s life” and is experienced as love. To have or do grace, people must be extraordinarily detached from ego, but they must also be deeply attached to others because their gift of divine life must be passed on. Love requires someone to be its recipient. It is not free-floating, without any object. As a gift, love must have both a donor and a recipient. It is freely given, not bought or sold. Jesus describes love as living water, a perpetual, effortless river of life flowing back to its sources in God. In the Kingdom, everyone will be a living spring. In the meantime, God continues to give life away, more than people deserve, whatever they will take. The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37) explores the nature of love on a practical plane. A lawyer quotes the second great commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus describes an Israelite attacked by robbers and left half dead on the road to Jericho. A priest sees him and walks by on the other side. A Levite does the same. “But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him was moved with pity” (Luke 10:33). The despised Samaritan bandages the man’s wounds, takes him to an inn and pays for his care. “Which of these three,” asks Jesus, “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” “The one who showed him mercy,” the lawyer replies. Jesus says “Go and do likewise.” The priest and the Levite, members of elite groups, are blind to their suffering neighbor as they are blind to their own unexamined imperfections and pain. The Samaritan is “moved with pity.” He can identify with and embrace even his enemy in a free gift of love. The contrast between

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the hard-heartedness of the upper-class figures and the pity shown by the devalued Samaritan suggests that he may have learned through suffering to recognize his own face in the face of the victim. Powerful egos dissociate themselves from the weak, refusing to know them, a strategy preventing self-recognition of their own mortality. All three men love their “neighbors” as themselves, but the upper-class figures have few neighbors and little authentic self-love. The Samaritan, who knows and loves himself, in all his human frailty, extends this grace freely to all. The parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–24) mixes the themes of love and justice in a rich web of images. A man has two sons. The younger, who is planning to leave, asks that his share of the inheritance be given to him at once. From his point of view, he is asking only for his fair share, though it rightfully belongs to the father until his death. The young man, caught up in obsessive urges, squanders his fortune in dissolute living. He has stepped outside the law into a self-induced wasteland of slavery. When a famine strikes, he is reduced to literal slavery, feeding the pigs on a farm. “He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.” Here there are no gifts or rewards, not even food for his labor. “But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough to spare, but here I am dying of hunger.’” He “comes to himself,” that is, recognizes himself, through rethinking, as a sinner and a slave, alone and helpless in the wasteland. But he seeks atonement, unity, with the father and resolves to return and offer the classic expression of repentance: “Father, I have sinned.” “But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” The young man confesses his sin, saying, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” The old and foolish persona is gone. The father commands his servant, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.” The best robe, like the one Jacob gave Joseph, is a sign of fatherly love, freely given, not mandated by property rights. The father orders the fatted calf to be killed for a great feast, “for this son of mine was dead and is alive again.” The motif of the hero’s rebirth follows naturally in the classic narrative of the youth’s fall from the garden and passage through death in the underworld. The elder son, working in the field, hears the music and celebration and returns. When he learns what has happened, he becomes angry and refuses to go in. His father pleads with him, but he says, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.” Now the son sees himself “working like

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a slave,” never rewarded for his work. “But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him.” The father has given an extravagant reward where punishment is due. He consoles the troubled young man by reassuring him of his identity, his sonship. “You are always with me and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” Sometimes stories of rival siblings end with the mutual recognition of the brothers, as in the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau, and Joseph and his brothers. In Luke’s account, the prodigal son achieves self-recognition, but the older brother seems unreconciled to the situation. Perhaps the Gospel story suggests that the reborn prodigal has moved on to the Kingdom, leaving behind the world of reward and punishment. His status is certainly changed, since he is living on his father’s love rather than on inheritance rights. The parables return to the issue of the Book of Job: why, if there is a just God, do rewards and punishments appear to be so capriciously distributed? In Job, Satan bets that humans function only in systems offering payment and sanctions. Job’s comforters make the same bet: “You must have done something.” Most of the Book of Job is reasonable argument defending universal structures of justice. The arguments are blown away by the whirlwind of unreason. The Lord rejects reward/punishment as the basis of action and shows himself to Job in a way that transforms him. Job lives a second life on a plane elevated past hope and fear. The parables also come at the issue of retributive justice, but not in the reasonable terms of Job’s comforters. They revel instead in the paradox of the Kingdom, the free circulations of unearned love, not the mystery of undeserved punishment.

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ased on the paradox that the last will be first, the messianic Kingdom is in fundamental opposition to the hierarchies of institutions and power structures. In rejecting rewards and punishments, Jesus subverts the control mechanisms of post-tribal societies. He thrives on insecurity: “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matt. 11:19). The Kingdom points to a typological return to the garden, or to the forty years of Exodus, living on manna, God’s free gift—no troubles, no rules—a blessed anarchy. Inevitably, the Kingdom clashes with the system. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Pharaoh is the archetype of coercive power pitted against the people. In the Gospels, power is more diffuse, residing in institutions; a lone hero, Jesus, pits himself against the darkness of power. He frequently calls himself “the Son of Man,” a phrase meaning human being but emphasizing mortality. He has no doubts as to what the struggle will cost him: I come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division . . . Father against son and son against father. (Luke 12:49–51)

The leadership of Israel was hostile to Rome but divided internally and forced to compromise and negotiate. Jesus was a threat to détente with Rome because he stirred up an already volatile situation in unexpected ways. His rejection of institutionalized responses to power made him a

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threat to the small Jewish elite as well as to Rome. Inevitably, his rejection of rules was interpreted as a rejection of Torah. Luke relates Jesus’ ironic remarks on his outsider status: To what then will I compare the people of this generation? . . . They are like children sitting in the market place and calling to one another: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; We wailed and you did not weep.” For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say “He has a demon”; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (Luke 7:31–34)

Jesus recapitulates the prophetic criticism of ritual worship when substituted for social justice. One of the clearest examples of the strife between Jesus and the institutional powers is contained in Mark 7:1–23, when the Pharisees note that “some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands.” (Mark goes on to describe orthodox dietary rules and purity codes). When asked why his followers violate the traditions of the elders, Jesus replies by quoting Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Is. 29:13). His quote puts him squarely in the prophetic tradition: the individual speaking truth to power. He accuses the Pharisees of evading the essence of the law while keeping up appearances. “Listen to me all of you and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defiles” (Mark 7:15). His disciples do not understand and ask for an explanation. Food, he says, “cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer.” Mark adds, parenthetically, “Thus he declared all foods clean.” The things that defile come from within the human heart: “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.” Like the prophets, Jesus focuses on basic moral realities rather than ritual behaviors. Some of the scribes and Pharisees understand Jesus’ meaning, as in Mark 12:33 when a scribe comments that the commandments to love God and neighbor are “much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” Jesus replies, “You are not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.” Most of the time, however, Jesus is at odds with the leadership. In Matthew 23:2–3, he says to the crowd: “The scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.” They lock

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people out of heaven by imposing onerous rules. Though they are precise rule-keepers they “have neglected the weightier matters of the Law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel”(Matt. 23:23–4). He calls them hypocrites, greedy and selfindulgent. They are, he says, like whitewashed tombs, beautiful to the eyes, but full of dead men’s bones (Matt. 23:27). Jesus poses these harsh criticisms against a broad historical background. The Pharisees, he says, decorate the tombs of the prophets, saying, “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets” (Matt. 23:30). In this, Jesus says, they deceive themselves. They are merely the latest in a line of powerful people who persecute the prophets. Jesus describes God as sending “prophets, sages and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, so that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth . . . Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” The conflict between Jesus and the leadership is a variant of the universal archetype of the hero and the dragon. As in so many modern narratives, Kafka through Matrix, the hero faces destruction from corrupt power systems internal to his culture. While the prophetic books prepare the reader for this development, the Gospels represent a departure from the prior focus on exterior enemies, represented by Pharaoh, Babylon and the other aggressive pagan empires. Here, the problem is not from the outside in, but from the top down. Given that this shift in attention may be endemic in any age of concentrated power, there is still something disturbing about Jesus’ vehement criticism of the Pharisees. Is a blanket, group condemnation ever appropriate when we know that individual good people exist in all elite groups? Certainly, the Pharisees do not think of themselves as sinners, nor do the people, by and large. Yet Jesus accuses them of hypocrisy, of living a lie that betrays the Law. M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist and theologian, focuses on collective evil in “Mylai: An Examination of Group Evil” (1983). He points out that most elite groups (like the Pharisees) think well of themselves, and mutually reinforce a sense of group worth. Military and police units, professors and doctors, clerics and politicians, CEOs and pro athletes—all bond in specialized groups that excel in some area. An esprit de corps develops and becomes a cohesive binding force. The members talk alike and think alike and often dress alike. Elite groups have client groups—students, voters, patients, church members, stockholders,

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the civilian population. Theoretically, the leadership exists to serve the followers. Things can go wrong in a couple of different ways. The clients trust the elite and may simply turn over their maturity and authority to a decisive leadership. Peck cites Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in which, under orders from imposing men in lab coats, subjects consent to administer what seem to be excruciating electrical shocks to screaming victims. Of course, the “victims” are not really being shocked; the shocking outcome is that 65 percent of the subjects, all adults, followed orders to inflict pain (Peck 1983, 114). When faced with authority figures, many people are willing to regress a bit and let the “experts” make the tough decisions. This compliance feeds the narcissism of the leadership. They experience themselves as uniquely gifted and unfailingly right. Typically, the elite identify with other power groups, rejecting victims, supporting authority. They are conventional and submissive to higher-ups. If the institution— political, religious, professional—is challenged or comes under pressure it may respond by focusing on an “enemy,” real or imagined. The Roman occupation was a very real threat to the survival of Israel, as history demonstrates. The Pharisees, as keepers of the old traditions, were right to recognize Rome’s destructive propensities. When the members of an elite align against a common enemy (Romans, Communists, terrorists), the internal authority of the leadership is enhanced. Sometimes, however, if the enemy is too powerful for direct confrontation, the pool of scapegoats widens to include more manageable enemies. All questions and challenges are viewed as attacks or heresy, treason or cowardice. “My country, right or wrong.” Nothing must change. To drop an outworn or mistaken policy would be to admit being wrong. The group goes into denial, refusing to acknowledge shortcomings. Whistle-blowers are anathema. Cover-ups are staged, spin doctors emerge, evidence is destroyed. Peck points out that the original value of the idea or skill represented by the elite group is thoroughly distorted by these defensive behaviors. The leadership’s original role of service is replaced by a dictatorial urge to control the membership and destroy the adversary, real or imagined. Eventually, both the client group and the enemy arouse mixed feelings of fear and contempt in the elite. They become dangerous not only to the outsiders but to their own clients. An unwillingness to question oneself, or to consider conflicting views becomes the self-inflicted blindness and hardness of heart decried by the prophets. Ignoring evidence, devising euphemisms, rewriting history—all of these reactionary strategies construct a protective façade, a vast lie. Jesus call these liars “hypocrites.”

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They are different from the common sinners that Jesus loves. Mary Magdalene and the tax collector are not blind to their imperfections. But instead of projecting anger onto the other, the adversary or scapegoat, they “rethink” their identities and weep for their sins. Acknowledging sin is the first step toward giving it up. Modern elite groups cultivate stoicism: “Big boys don’t cry,” “Never let ‘em see you sweat.” To conceal weakness they repress emotion and refuse to feel pain. Ego is impermeable to others’ pain. The powerful have no compassion for themselves or for others. They cannot identify with the wounded, the poor, the different. Jesus’ sinners allow themselves to feel their largely self-inflicted pain, and they drop the obsessive behavior that has taken over and injured them. Their compassion for themselves overflows into compassion for others. In the Gospels, the wealthy fare almost as badly as the hypocrites. “No one can serve two masters . . . you cannot serve God and wealth” (Matt. 6:26). A man asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?’” (Mark 10:17). He replies: “You know the commandments,” and lists the prohibition against murder, adultery, theft, and so forth. The man replies that he has kept these rules since his youth. Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said: “You lack one thing; Go, Sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. (Mark 10:21–2)

Jesus remarks, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” The disciples are perplexed, but Jesus emphasizes his point. “Children, how hard it is to enter the Kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.” Does he mean this literally? No rich people in heaven? In an alternative reading the “eye of the needle” is identified as a very narrow gate in the wall of ancient Jerusalem. Camels must be unpacked before they can squeeze through; likewise the wealthy must be “detached” from their goods. Jesus’ followers, as usual, take him literally and are appalled by his critique of riches: “Then who can be saved?” they ask. The man who asked Jesus the question cannot remember ever breaking the law, and the people regard him as much more righteous than they. His riches, after all, must be a reward for his good behavior: Jesus’ response is ambiguous. “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.” Even the rich have a chance in the providential plan.

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The parable of Lazarus conveys a similar dubiety concerning the place of the rich in the Kingdom: There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. At his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. (Luke 16:19–22)

Dives, the rich man, prays to Abraham from Hades for relief. During his life he was indifferent to the poor, offering neither food nor sympathy. Abraham tells him “a great chasm has been fixed” so that no one may cross from hell into heaven. “Then, Father Abraham, I beg you to send [Lazarus] to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.” Abraham’s reply looks ahead to Jesus’ resurrection. “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” The wealthy brothers pay no real attention to the Law and will not respond to Christ’s message either. In the new dispensation, elites, self-satisfied and blind to the sufferings of others, will be excluded while beggars will be drawn into the feast of the Kingdom. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’ last address to a crowd of followers concludes with a description of the Last Judgment (Matt. 25:31). When Jesus comes in glory, he will “separate the sheep from the goats,” and say to those on his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” The basis for salvation is caring for the needy: “I was hungry,” Jesus says, “and you gave me food.” The righteous ask when they fed Jesus, and he replies, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Those who feed the hungry, welcome strangers, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit the imprisoned will go in to eternal life. The call to “give up everything” is realized, in practical terms, by works of mercy, meeting the common needs of ordinary people—caring for the widows and orphans among us. Some religious leaders perceive the injunction to feed the hungry as referring to spiritual hunger. They scorn the notion that religion is mere “social work” and maintain the priority of personal conversion and the enactment of ritual as the marks of faith. But building the Kingdom is a matter of works as well as faith. It requires more than ceremony and preaching. St. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the Gospels always—if necessary, use

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words.” The up-building of the order of love is, in part, a political process, establishing peace and social justice as normative. It requires a reordering of the distribution of government spending and a reduction of the disparities in wealth. The methods of the Kingdom are peaceful, countering the slow-motion violence of entrenched poverty by opening people’s eyes to the selfish mechanisms determining oppressive class divisions. In applying Gospel lessons to American society, theologian Marcus Borg points out that the ancient empires were structured so that half to two-thirds of the wealth was concentrated in one to five percent of the populations. The peasants, who were ninety percent of the populace, lived marginal existences, underfed, dying young of illness and exposure (Borg 2003, 130). Borg cites Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: “In the twenty year period between the late 1970’s and the late 1990’s the percentage of total wealth owned by the wealthiest one percent of the [American] population nearly doubled, increasing from 21% to just over 40%” (Borg 2003, 140). The income ratio between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent is higher in America (11 to 1) than in any other developed country (Borg 2003, 140). In Japan and Belgium, for example, the ratio is closer to four to one. A New York Times editorial states that in 2004, “the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay at large companies had ballooned to 431 to 1 (“Another Marie Antoinette Moment,” 1–16). If the injunction to feed the hungry and clothe the naked is to have any practical application it must involve the reorganization of government to ensure greater rewards for working people and better care for those unable to work. Poverty is not caused by a cabal of rich people, and it will not be solved by private contributions to the Red Cross. Building the Kingdom involves opening people’s eyes, as Martin Luther King did, to the loveless and largely unexamined mechanisms engendering social inequities. Making the last come first is a heroic mission, calling for the peaceful, but dangerous prophetic act of speaking truth to power.

T HE S ERMON

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M OUNT

Like Moses, Jesus goes to the mountaintop to deliver wisdom to the people. The Sermon on the Mount is a collection of orphic sayings and aphorisms believed to have been preserved in the Q source (Matt. 5–7; Luke 6–7). Matthew’s account begins with the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The Hebrew root for “blessed,” used many times in the psalms and wisdom literature, means “straight” or “in the right direction.” To “sin,” however, is to “miss the

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mark.” The poor in spirit move straight and true to the mark. They are unencumbered by their possessions. “Beatus” is the Latin root of “blessed” and is sometimes translated as “happy” or blissful. The beatitudes do not promise future rewards, as in a system of law. They describe people who “are happy,” who live in the Kingdom, on some level, and experience its freedom. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” The experience of being “blessed,” or “happy,” does not rule out pain or loss. Hard-hearted people do not feel their own pain, or the pain of others. The Great Commandment to love others as yourself goes beyond being good advice. It is a statement of the way the moral universe is structured. We always treat ourselves as well or as badly as we treat others. “Those who mourn” have open hearts, feeling the universal pain of human limitation. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Mark describes the meek, or child-like: People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it. (Mark 10:14)

In the end, the egotists will self-destruct, leaving the fruitful garden to the children. The heroic myth of transformation ends where it began, in the simplicity and innocence of the garden of childhood. The twice-born child, the “wise-baby,” represents a return to the center, a passionate wisdom, a restoration of the intense, holistic experience of children. T. S. Eliot speaks of this return as “a condition of complete simplicity/costing not less than everything/ . . . a lifetime’s death in love” (“Little Gidding” 1952, 145). Paul Ricoeur calls it “second naivete” (Ricoeur, 1967, 352). In the Kingdom, there is no need for the strategies and tactics characterizing the frenetic passage through the wasteland. The armature of rigid ideas and collective certainties collapses and the vital simplicity of the child’s experience emerges with renewed energy. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” The blessed offer bread to the poor and God offers them righteousness, the bread of life. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” If you show mercy to others, you will show mercy to yourself. A Japanese proverb states this truth in the obverse: “The vengeful man must dig two graves, one for his enemy and one for himself.” “Blessed are

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the pure in heart, for they will see God.” “Pure,” single-hearted, unconflicted, simple, wide-eyed. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” Arrogant power declares: “We don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat it.” The most intractable madness and hatred springs from simplistic black versus white thinking: “He started it.” “They hate us, so we have to kill all of them.” “Do unto others before they have a chance to do unto you.” Warmakers project their own aggressions and narcissism onto the outsiders and perceive them as fearsome enemies. They provoke a mounting spiral of fear and violence. Peacemakers cling to reason, to negotiation. They call on both parties to concede a degree of mutual guilt, but recognize the humanity of the quarrelling parties. War-makers choose the mindless strategy of perpetual war. Not peace, but “Victory.” Peacemakers show the way to choose life, to step away from the self-destructive energies of egotism. The beatitudes end by predicting persecution for the righteous: “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” “You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus proclaims. Salt intensifies and enhances flavor. “You are the light of the world, a city built on a hill cannot be hid.” (Mark 5:13–14). Light is the medium for vision, allowing us to experience the world in a vivid way. The blessed, like salt and light, are catalysts, allowing others to better experience reality in its fullness. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” Jesus does not mean he has come to “enforce” the law, though “not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:17). His role is to manifest the law at its most intense level of meaning. Jesus goes on to cite various laws from the Torah and then amends them to extend and interiorize their meaning. “You have heard it said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’ . . . But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” Likewise with the injunction against adultery: “But I tell you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Emphasis shifts from act to attitude. Jesus forbids divorce as strongly as the law forbids adultery. “Anyone who divorces his wife . . . causes her to commit adultery.” Joachim Jeremias points out that the rejection of divorce is related to a parallel passage in Mark: Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to

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divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you, But from the beginning of creation ‘God made them male and female’ For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh ‘What God has joined together, let no one separate.’” (Mark 10:2–8)

The Pharisees rely on Moses, but Jesus goes back to Genesis and the Creator’s word. The Mosaic law permitting divorce is a concession, fashioned for the fallen world. In the Kingdom, marriage is based on love, obviating divorce. “The original will of God, the pure paradise-will of God is valid there” (Jeremias, 1963b, 62). The command to love your neighbor becomes “Love your enemies,” as God loves the good and the bad. “Be perfect therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” “If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” (Matt. 5:46–7). Imitate the Father who “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain for the righteous and unrighteousness.” (Matt. 5:45) In the ecology of the Kingdom, love shines on everyone, like the sun in God’s sky. As Thomas Merton observes, the impulse to destroy the enemy brings self-destruction: “To attack another with an ingot of red hot iron, I have to pick up the incandescent metal and burn my own hand while burning the other. Hate itself is the seed of death in my own heart” (No Man is an Island 1955, 36) “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ But I say do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also”(Matt. 5:38–9). The admonition to “turn the other cheek” has been condemned as promoting passivity, a morality for slaves. The twentieth century idealized a Nietzschean or Promethean defiance of power. Given the horrors of colonialism, Nazism, and the others, suicidal defiance has a certain attraction. Better, at least, than indifference. But the most positive developments of the recent past were achieved by negotiation, by nonviolent resistance, by unarmed crowds appealing to conscience, by the institution of peacekeeping organizations and mutually beneficial agreements. War is endemic in the wasteland; it is the natural outcome of the clash of strong egos. Rene Girard’s analysis of “mimetic violence” (1977) paints a scenario in which adversaries, whether individuals or nations, become mirror images of each other, even as they engage in bloody conflict. In conventional warfare both sides seek the same goals, using complementary strategies, moves, and countermoves. Their economic policies, social and family structures are all impacted and shaped by the war effort. When fully engaged, the opponents focus entirely on each

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other, like karate masters moving in a choreography of violence. “Turning the other cheek” is saying no to that dance. It is a courageous refusal to engage in the lockstep chaos of war. These heightened laws are interspersed with examples of extreme behavior: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away” (Matt. 5:29). Over the years, these extreme measures and “hard sayings” have prompted extreme interpretations. Some see them as literally intended calls to absolute perfection and self-control. Others think they are a sign of apocalyptic times, an interim ethic—doable, short term—until the end comes. Joachim Jeremias says they are not laws at all, but descriptions of the behavior of the blessed: “What is here taught is symptoms, signs, examples of what it means when the Kingdom of God breaks into the world” (1963b, 63). Turning the other cheek is not a prerequisite for salvation; it is the effect of salvation. Kindness and endurance flow naturally from the children of God, like light from the city on a hill. The Gospel injunction to turn the other cheek or to love the enemy is not so much a call for peaceful civil disobedience as a description of the coming of the apocalyptic kingdom. It is a type of Isaiah’s “peacable kingdom,” where lions and lambs lie down together and a little child leads the way (Is. 11). Only those who are disengaged from the demands of ego can hope to practice this peace. Freedom from ego, from the competition for power, means freedom from lust and anxiety, the positive and negative poles pulling the arrow from its path, causing it to “miss the mark.” Sinners, distracted and confused, misdirected to petty goals, are like hobbled runners, moving in contorted, mistaken lunges. The pure in heart run free. Isaiah says that when the Kingdom comes, “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9). The illusions generated by projection and obsession will fall away and Wisdom will rule. The blessed move effortlessly through work and play alike, with no winners or losers, no lost motion. In Matthew 6, Jesus addresses the private and interior nature of prayer and good deeds. Charitable giving was regarded in the ancient world as essential to virtue; public recognition of philanthropy was thought to encourage and reward almsgiving. “Give in secret,” says Jesus. “Don’t let your left hand know what your right is doing.” “Your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you” (Matt. 6:2–4). Don’t pray loudly in the temple or on street corners. People who do so “have received their reward” by impressing others with their piety. Don’t make long prayers, “heaping up empty phrases as the gentiles do.” “Go into your room, and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.” He “knows what you need

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before you ask for it.” As an example of private prayer Jesus recites the “Our Father,” or Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus uses the word abba, a diminutive or familiar form of “father,” like dad or papa. The prayer begins with three exclamations praising God’s glory. The first, “Hallowed be thy name,” means that the divine identity, in its every varied expression, is holy—whole, complete, in immeasurable plenty. Holy things are “set aside” from common use. They simply are, in and for themselves, requiring no justification. The holy name is the nexus, binding all meaning together in congruence. Prayer begins by recognizing the mighty order of the name. “Thy Kingdom come.” Let it be—Let it come to us—Let it be realized in us. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Some great day the chaos of the wasteland will be righted and all will move in peaceful orbits like the paths of the stars. The second part of the prayer descends to the sphere of ordinary life: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Life for the poor of Israel had grown increasingly difficult under the burdens of Roman colonization. Luke’s version of the beatitudes (6:21) does not mention hungering after righteousness but after solid food. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” As Marcus Borg points out, “Bread, enough food, was always an issue in the peasant class . . . God’s Kingdom (in contrast to the other kingdoms they knew) is about enough bread” (Borg 2003, 133). In their difficult journey, the blessed ask God for food, like the manna in the desert, appearing every day, unearned but unfailing. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In Matthew 7:1, Jesus urges, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged.” Our actions reflect our capacities. We earn our fates. If we treat others with mean and narrow vindictiveness that is what we will do to ourselves in our defining moments. Eventually, we internalize what we have projected on others. If we love greatly we will love ourselves and so be able to sustain a greater measure of God’s love. “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” This is sometimes translated “Do not put us to the test,” as Abraham and Job were “tested.” Or it may reflect on the sort of overconfidence displayed by Peter when he swore, before the crucifixion, that he would never abandon Christ. It is an acknowledgment that we but slenderly know ourselves. Perhaps it expresses a hope for “peace in our day,” for escape from the dire testing of the descent into the underworld of suffering. Or for deliverance if the day of trial comes.

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The Sermon on the Mount ends with a promise of peace. The children of God are not to “store up . . . treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume,” but must follow their hearts to the treasures of the spirit where they will rest content (Matt. 6:19): Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear . . . Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life span? (Matt. 6:25–27)

Proverbial wisdom praises hard work and prudence, but from the vantage point of the Kingdom, these virtues are secondary. Anxieties about daily life are pointless, mere distractions obscuring the greater providential realities. The heroic wife described in Proverbs 31 spins and sews tirelessly to clothe her children in crimson, her husband in purple and linen. Jesus asks, “Why do you worry about clothing?” “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these” (Matt. 6:28). The blessed have a place in the nourishing flow of life as surely as do the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. But they are not like other people, “the Gentiles,” who strive after the physical necessities. “Do not worry, saying ‘What will we eat?’ . . . Indeed your heavenly father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God . . . and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:25–33). The children of God are secure in their places, free to follow their hearts, to pursue their own natures with no more anxiety than the lilies of the field: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Matt. 6–34). The children live in “now,” the still point between past and future. “Ask and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7). All their works, their searches and questions, will come to fruition as they move easily and surely down their appointed paths.

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4 T H E PA S S I O N

S hortly before his death, Christ asks the disciples, “Who do the crowds

say I am?” (Luke 9:18). The apostles answer that some think he is John the Baptist, risen from the dead, or Elijah or one of the other prophets. “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, “The Messiah of God.” “He sternly ordered them not to tell anyone, saying ‘The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and scribes and be killed, and on the third day be raised.’” Immediately after this prophecy of his own death, Jesus says: If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves? (Luke 9:23–25)

Theologian Marcus Borg points out that the sequence of death and rebirth is At the heart not only of Christianity but of the other enduring religions of the world . . . Muhammad is reported to have said, “Die before you die.” . . . die metaphorically (and really) before you die literally . . . Lau Tzu said “If you want to become full, let yourself be empty; if you want to be reborn, let yourself die.” (Borg 119, 1998)

Buddhist thought follows a parallel track on the transformative process from selfishness to liberation. The cause of discord is tanha, obsessive cravings based on a refusal to recognize certain inevitable aspects of human

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experience. Alan W. Watts describes the “three signs of being” which, if accepted and assimilated, deliver the enlightened one: Amicca—Change or Impermanence Anatta—literally, “no-self.” The unreality of the ego as a permanent, self-contained and self-directing unit. Dukkha—Suffering in its widest sense. (Watts 1970, 150)

The Bible presents Jahweh, the source of being, as a generative activity rather than stone-graven, immutable “fact.” Everything changes; nothing real remains unchanged by the process that is being. The “old-man,” the ego, is neither real, finally, nor immortal. Heroes, like Christ, “live toward death.” Suffering is an inevitable fact of life; if it is accepted and lived through, rather than denied, it is the vehicle of transformation. The Buddha (derived from the root to know) achieves nirvana, escape from the wheel of worldly life: “a circle which turns on and on as long as we try to grapple with the opposites in their own terms, as long as we set pleasure against pain, life against death, permanence against change, and acceptance against escape” (Watts 1970, 151). In Mahayana Buddhism, the great saints are the Bodhisattvas, who choose to remain in the cycle of life to help others achieve enlightenment. They make no absolute distinction between ordinary life and the unitary world, or Kingdom, in which they move. The one and the many are different aspects of the same process, like the contractions and expansions of a beating heart. The paradox of death leading to life is basic to the transformation imagery of sacred ritual and the hero myth. Herman Melville speaks of the orphan’s search for true identity: “Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them; the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it” (Moby Dick, ch 114, 430). To find themselves, Jesus’ followers accept their own mortality. They “deny themselves,” that is, resist the demands of ego, the public self, the autobiographical “me,” formed by circumstance and cultural pressure. Ego is bent on control; it “judges everything in our experience according to whether it is good or bad for me, as a private, separate individual” (Bruteau 1996, 22). Because ego is so much a product of acculturation it is contingent, ephemeral—goals and tastes and fears are modeled on the conventions of one’s society. We are captive, Emerson says in “prisons of glass we cannot see” (“Experience” 361). Those who devote their energy to preserving this brittle husk will lose the opportunity to become their true selves. Ego must be sacrificed to allow the fully realized self, the soul, to emerge. Heroic transformation,

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taking up the cross daily, is deeply painful, but peeling away the defensive masks reveals a new aspect of self—clean and true and more intensely alive. Jesus’ death is prefigured by two heavily symbolic scenes: the transfiguration and the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Both are visionary expressions of transformation and intensification of life. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up to the mountaintop, and, like Moses receiving the Law (Exod. 24:17). Jesus appears in glory. “While he was praying the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Luke 9:29). To figurate is to interpret sense impressions, to integrate the input of the senses so as to recognize shape and sound, to find a gestalt. Jesus is transfigured, that is, beyond figuration, hovering at the farthest reaches of recognition. He stands talking with the glorified figures of Moses and Elijah, discussing his “departure” (Greek “exodus”) from Jerusalem. Peter and the others are stunned, weighted down with sleep but manage to retain consciousness. Peter, “not knowing what he said,” offers to build three dwellings for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses. As he speaks, they are over shadowed by a terrifying cloud, and hear a thunderous voice: “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.” When the voice has spoken, Jesus is found alone. In Mark’s account (9:10), Christ asks the apostles to keep the matter secret until the Son of Man has risen from the dead. They ask each other “What does rising from the dead mean?” The disciples keep silence and tell no one what they have seen. John prefaces the events leading to Jesus’ death by an account (the only gospel account) of the raising of Lazarus. This last “sign,” resurrection, stands just before Christ’s crucifixion. His death is bracketed between two scenes of resurrection. Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha, live at Bethany, a village just outside of Jerusalem. The tensions between Jesus and the power structure have intensified to the point where he has barely escaped being arrested and stoned for blasphemy. Lazarus becomes sick and the sisters send for Jesus. The disciples warn him of the danger of returning to the area of Jerusalem, but he decides to go anyway, even though he knows that Lazarus is already dead. Thomas, one of his followers says, in despairing courage, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Martha greets Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” “Your brother will rise again.” She replies that he will rise, with every one else, on the last day, a widely held belief in the Judaism of Jesus’ day. “Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.’” As in his encounter with the Samaritan woman, Jesus appropriates a form of Jahweh’s name, “I am who I Am.” In saying, “I am the resurrection and the life,” he indicates that he

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embodies the endless life symbolized in the archetypal figure of the hero who lays his life down to take it up again. Lazarus’ sister, Mary, perhaps conflated with Mary Magdalene, is identified as the woman “who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair.” She runs to him weeping, and Jesus is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” As they walk to the tomb, he begins to weep for Lazarus, for the sisters and for himself. Women will soon be walking to his own tomb to anoint his body. Some of the mourners exclaim, “See how he loved him!” But others, seeing his tears, ask, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Lazarus has been dead for four days, a duration signifying certain death. When Jesus orders the stone rolled back, Martha, the practical sister, protests, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Nevertheless, the tomb is opened, Jesus prays, and calls out, “Lazarus, come forth!” The dead man rises, his face covered by a cloth, his limbs bound with the linen bands used to swaddle infants and to wrap corpses. “Unbind him, and let him go.” Jesus frees Lazarus from the bondage of death, removes the veil from his face, and restores him to life. John sees a causal relationship between this episode and Jesus’ death. Some witnesses go to the Pharisees to report what they have seen, and the ruling council meets: “What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” Their fears are based on long experience with colonization and were proven well founded some thirty years later when Rome destroyed Jerusalem after a failed rebellion. Caiaphas, the high priest, proposes to resolve the dilemma by assassinating Jesus. “It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:50). John suggests that Caiaphas has uttered a prophecy, by virtue of being the high priest: “He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.” The authorities make a pragmatic decision to eliminate one person for the good of the many; Jesus sees it coming and lets it happen. “From that day on, they planned to put him to death.” He retires to the countryside for a time, but six days before Passover Jesus returns to Jerusalem to meet the fate he foresees. He visits the home of Lazarus, and Mary anoints his feet with precious oil. Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, asks why Mary didn’t sell the ointment and give the money to the poor. John tells us in an aside that “He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common

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purse and used to steal what was put in it” (John 12:6). Jesus rebukes him: “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” The next day, crowds throng the streets of Jerusalem, shouting “Hosanna!” and calling Jesus “King of Israel” (John 12:13). Jesus rides a young donkey, alluding to Zechariah 9:9. “Lo, your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey.” The Pharisees say to one another, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.” John tells us that his disciples did not understand these signs at the time, but that in retrospect, after the resurrection, they remember the events and understand the typological references. Jesus tells his followers that his time has come: The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:23–25)

Translating to psychological terms, the grain of wheat is the ego, hard, self-contained, complex. Egotism rejects transformation in favor of bigger and better models of the status quo. Goethe observed that “everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.” Real change involves surprise, lack of control, being carried along in powerful currents. All of these are anathema to the conservative/aggressive aspect of consciousness. Ego demands to live forever—as is. Seeds contain within themselves the genetic codes to produce new life—roots, leaves, seeds—all of which remain unrealized unless the seed loses itself in the natural process of growth. Heroes from every culture defy the imperatives of ego and go down into darkness to bring new life. Jesus tells his disciples that they must follow him through a transformative process as radical and essential as the birth process if they are to experience the heightened life he represents. The ego is tense, like a clenched fist or a hard heart. Ezekiel promises “new hearts.” “I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:26). As the hour of transformation approaches, Jesus is troubled. “What shall I say? Father, save me from this hour?” (John 12:27). “No,” he says, this ordeal is why he has come. He prays and a voice from heaven glorifies God’s name. The crowd hears only thunder. Jesus tells them that the world is at a turning point, a time of judgment. Satan, the “ruler of this world” will be driven out, and Jesus, “when lifted up from the earth, will

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draw all people” to himself (John 12:32). They do not listen to him; though he pleads with them to “walk in the light,” they do “not believe in him.” So Jesus departs and hides his light from them. John quotes Isaiah, “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts.” “Many even of the authorities believed in him. But because of the Pharisees they did not confess, for fear they would be put out of the synagogues; for they loved human glory more than the glory that comes from God” (John 12:42–43). Jesus offers new light, a new medium for vision, but the crowd clings to the old matrix. “Whoever sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world.”

T HE L AST S UPPER Transformation imagery permeates the synoptic gospels’ account of Jesus’ Passover meal with the apostles. They assemble in the upper room of a house in Jerusalem, and Jesus says, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you, I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God” (Luke 22:14–16). Then he took a cup and after giving thanks he said, “Take this and divide it among yourselves . . . Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given up for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” (Luke 22:19–20). Matthew’s account adds that his blood is “poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:27). Paul and many other interpreters read the shedding of Jesus’ blood as a ransom or exchange of value. In this extrinsic view, Jesus “pays for” the sins of everyone from Adam forward. If we take a more intrinsic view, one based on grace rather than payment, Jesus’ sacrifice effects internal change in those who are willing to understand the meaning of sacrifice. The world conditions us to take advantage, to compete for power. Ego identity (the “old man”) is always comparative and, in fact, competitive. We think more of ourselves if we have more of the things society admires. As Bernice Bruteau points out, this sort of value is based on scarcity. If everybody has a Humvee, then the cachet is gone. Since scarcity and deprivation play a pivotal role in self-esteem, “our feeling good about ourselves depends on other people feeling bad” (Bruteau 1996, 79). If we miss out on a prize, we try to “get even,” or, if that is not possible, we tear other people down

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to compensate for our own feeling of inferiority. Such ruthless individualism defaces the best identity of everyone involved. The people of Jesus’ world endured Roman rule in much the same way as those third world people Frantz Fanon calls “the wretched of the earth” have suffered under colonialism. Institutionalized violence of poverty and enslavement has a numbing effect on the psyche. The oppressed are marginalized, made to form little more than a background for their powerful masters. In the face of poverty and despair, the psyche “shrinks back and obliterates itself” (Fanon 1963, 51). A terrible sense of isolation, of lost identity, sets in. The bonds among human beings, those ties Aime Cesaire calls the “frail splendor of the umbilical cord” the ‘bread and wine of complicity,” are broken. Tension builds so strongly that violence and self destruction are inevitable. When we say that Jesus “saves man from his sins,” sin should be understood to mean the tangle of fears and obsessions leading to violence and depersonalization. Jesus bonds with sinners, recognizing them as brothers and sisters. When the violence of the system focuses on Jesus, the liberator, he “bears the sins” of the culture, feeling in his own body the full weight of sin. His enactment of the sacrificial archetype demands imitation, calling others to awaken to the heroic potential in themselves. As we have noted, the pattern is deeply imprinted on consciousness, instantly recognized and assimilated. Self-sacrifice reverses the energy of the competitive power structure. It is grace in action, freely given love, the only kind of love there is. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe captures the transformative power of self-sacrifice in Tom’s death scene. He is tortured by Sambo and Quimbo, “debased and servile slaves” (Chapter XL, “The Martyr”), who despise themselves, each other, and all the enslaved. Tom refuses to reveal the hiding place of two women runaways. His willingness to suffer for a pair of slaves astounds his tormentors who have never seen anyone stand up to the master’s power on behalf of a slave. In Tom, they recognize a strength that validates the identities of the suffering victims. Eventually, they cut Tom from the rack and try to restore him, but it is too late. Nevertheless, they and many others find enhanced identity through recognizing themselves in Tom. Herman Melville’s Bill Budd ends with a similar scene. After Billy’s execution the sailors treasure pieces of the spar from which he was hanged “like pieces of the true cross” (738). The sailors are representative sinners, “an assortment of tribes and castaways,” living in the shadows below deck. Billy is a radiant innocent who becomes the target of fanatical, entrenched power. Billy embraces the crew, embodying their unrecognized beauty and power. He is hanged at dawn; watched by “the wedged mass of

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upturned faces, Billy ascended, and ascending, took the full rose of the dawn” (729–30). Melville’s combined images of death and resurrection mediate a new self-understanding for the crew. The men remember the young sailor in a ballad in which Billy shares a “bit o’ biscuit” (739) and a parting cup with them. He lies asleep at the bottom of the sea, unforgotten, dreaming among “the oozy weeds.” In Walden, chapter 2, Henry David Thoreau tells the story of a Hindu prince raised by strangers (94). A wise man recognizes him and reveals his true identity. The philosopher says, “So Soul, from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme.” The charismatic figures, the anointed ones, heal people who are contorted and twisted by the power flow and their adherence to it. The way of the Lord is through people. He “makes straight the way of the Lord.” When sinners recognize the heroic archetype in themselves, crippling obsessions and fears fall away and they fly straight as arrows. They have learned something of their true nature. When healed of competitive wounds to the ego, the compulsive needs to acquire goods, and to injure others fall away and sins are forgiven. The new covenant is between Jesus and all those who have eyes to see themselves in a new way. The ritual transformation of the bread and wine into the sacramental body and blood of Christ is part of a long series of biblical imagery linking bread and wine, blood and water with transformation. The Messianic feast, mentioned in the Passover agganah, will offer bread and wine, like that offered by Melchizedek for Abram. Both bread and wine are products of a transformative process, crushing the grapes, milling the grain, destroying the seeds of wheat to feed human life. Wisdom offers a feast, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed (Prov. 9:15). Like Wisdom, Ezekiel associates bread with the word of God. He accepts his prophetic role by eating a scroll, assimilating the Word. It is “sweet as honey” (Ezek. 3:3) on his tongue. Jesus says, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.” He is born in Beth-lehem, meaning “house of bread.” He lies in a manger, where grain is fed to the animals. “He is in the manger as food for the world” (Bruteau 1996, 59). These clusters of transformation imagery both acknowledge death and promise transcendence. Blood sacrifice signifies the hard truth that life feeds on life. Everything that nourishes us had life at one time. All life is interconnected and must return to its sacred source. The transformative aspect of mythic thought assures that life and death are reciprocally related and appear differently at different levels of development. Like change and

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continuity, life and death are linked realities, not polar opposites, but part of an organic process. H2O, when below zero degrees centigrade, is ice; when heated over 100 degrees centigrade it is steam. At in-between temperatures, water is liquid. It is always water, though it presents itself to experience in very different ways. Physicist John Polkinghorne calls the transition from ice to liquid to steam a “change in regime.” The laws of physics don’t change, but the outcomes of emergent processes can be unexpected and puzzling (Polkinghorne 1991, 306). In the garden, there was no death, no blood sacrifice. Adam and Eve were naked, innocent of fear and desire, fully integrated into the divine flow of life. The fallen world of good and evil is polarized—life and death appear as opposites, and blood sacrifice quickly turns into fratricidal murder, as Cain spills Abel’s blood. Rivalry, fear, and desire shape experience, breeding the will to power. Strong egos reject transformation. They are like seeds—intact, hard; they are in denial about death, and like Pharaoh, they expect to live forever in their stony pyramids. The Kingdom offers a return to the holistic vision of the garden. After the hero willingly parts with life, in pursuit of some greater goal, he becomes a source of life for others, allowing them to assimilate his meaning. The ego-life is the aspect of the self devoted to having and controlling in the delusional pursuit of power. When that is given over in favor of the heroic role of sacrifice, it marks a “change in regime,” like the passage from water to steam. The appearance of the hero archetype,“in the flesh,”introduces a word or universal symbol accessible to all. The figure of the dying hero, embodied in a historical figure, triggers strong emotions of identification. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of new life. Onlookers recognize their own potential and the painful price of transformation. The stone-blind see at last. If they can embrace the archetypal model, making it their own, their sins fall away and the true self emerges as the fulfillment of the death and rebirth process. John’s account of the last supper is longer than the synoptic gospel narratives, and more meditative. The meal described anticipates the Passover feast but is a day earlier (Christ dies, in John, at the time the paschal lambs are slaughtered.) Before beginning the meal, Jesus ties a towel around his waist and washes the feet of the apostles. Peter misreads the situation and objects to Jesus’ humble gesture, but Jesus tells him that if they are to be companions, he must not only accept this sign of service, but must imitate it, since the role of servant and master is reversed in the Kingdom. Jesus is deeply troubled, and reveals that someone in the group will betray him. The apostles are concerned and puzzled. “One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him.” (The beloved

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disciple is traditionally understood to be John himself.) He asks Jesus who the traitor is and Jesus replies, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” He gives it to Judas Iscariot. “Satan entered into him,” and Jesus asks him to do quickly what he is going to do. Judas leaves, walking out into the night. John does not recount the blessing of the bread and wine that figures so prominently in the other gospels. Communion is suggested only by the bread dipped in the dish and given to Judas as a sign of betrayal. Jesus tells his disciples, “Little children, I am with you only a little longer.” They cannot follow him now, but he gives them a new commandment, “Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples” (John 13:33–35). In John 15:12, Jesus clarifies the nature of the love he enjoins on them. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Why should love lead to death? In the simplicity of the garden, love leads to life: “Be fruitful and multiply.” In the fallen world, where the strong devour the weak, the law imposes a rough equity: “An eye for an eye”; “Love those who love you, hate your enemy.” The hero myth, always set in the wasteland, depicts a journey and a crossroads. One choice, self-interest, confirms the wisdom of the world, the prudence of forging alliances with the powerful, controlling and exploiting the weak. To choose the other road, the narrow path, is to live for love, for forces outside the personal ego. There is a sort of madness, or at least of paradox here, but also a great freedom. The main roads are like treadmills leading nowhere, permitting the illusion of progress while enforcing lock-step conformity. Seekers of all sorts—martyrs, artists, mothers and fathers, dedicated workers, people on a mission—find their paths out of the wilderness maze. Heroes come to recognize a choice between two versions of reality. One is the social consensus and the other is the Kingdom—an earned reality, generated, like light, by the choices and actions of those who will it to be real. The children of God reflect the Father, making new worlds as they go. Walt Whitman speaks of the creative power of the hero’s role near the end of “Song of Myself”: The poet stands on a knoll, Pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself . . . Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth, Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go. (Whitman, 46,77)

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The hero’s journey builds the “wonderful cities” of the Kingdom. Heroes do not go looking for death; on the contrary, their focus is on some great good, a new truth or an unrecognized beauty that they hope to realize. But the fallen world is obdurately opposed to change, promoting imitation, compulsive repetition, passivity—not life, but going through the motions of life. When challenged by innovators, critics or simply people who don’t “fit in” the power structure is unforgiving. It punishes some by destroying status, the basis of the conventional ego. Others are subjected to ridicule, or are fired or imprisoned. Some are worn down by the slow-motion violence of poverty or prejudice. Instead of fighting dragons, many heroes choose to serve the vulnerable. They go down to darkness mildly and humbly. Others are simply assassinated or executed as enemies of the state. Love leads to death because it is a counterforce to violence, the ordering force of the world. Jesus says, “Pick up your cross and follow me.” As the Passover meal is drawing to a close, he repeats that he is leaving them and Peter asks where Jesus is going. “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward.” Peter protests, “But I will lay down my life for you.” “Will you lay down your life? Very truly I tell you, before the cock crows you will have denied me three times (John 13:36–38). Peter can talk the talk but cannot yet walk the walk. The disciples continue confused; Luke records an argument over who among them is the greatest. Jesus chides them: “The greatest among you must become like the youngest . . . I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27). Their egotism blinds them to his meaning. Nevertheless, he comforts them: “Do not let your heart be troubled,” even though he is leaving soon, they will be with him. “In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” many ways of being: “And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to my Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my father also.” (John 14:4)

He is the way, the incarnate journey, the narrow path, the Tao. To know him is to be on the hero’s road, to know the story as one who acts a role in it. The road is the only way to the father. Whitman assures us that the road Is not far, it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,

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Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land. (Whitman, Song, 46: 1212)

”I am the Truth,” true across all times and cultures. In Hebrew, “emeth” means truth, in the sense of loyalty, being true to one’s love. Jesus represents this integrity, fully lived, deeply felt, purchased at great cost. “I am the Life,” shared life, moving back to its source, then forever out again. The hero is the intelligible, universal aspect of the Creator God, a way of translating overwhelming being into a human format. Insofar as God is present, he appears as love, the love that gives away everything, even life itself. Whitman says there is something, some word he cannot say (Whitman, Song 50:1312). “It is without name—it is a word unsaid,” not in any dictionary, a meta-word, beyond the earth’s orbit. He pleads for outlines, for understanding: Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is happiness.

In the tribal world, life-giving love was projected onto the gods and the great heroes of the culture. Common people participated in the divine life through ritual sacrifice. Jesus calls every person to leave home and set out, not in ritual, but in life. His followers are not defined by tribe and family, blood and soil, nor are they bound by faithfulness to dogma or ritual or law. Love, expressed in act, is the defining characteristic of Christ’s way. His call for the surrender of ego marks a turning point in the rise of the individual. Pharaoh’s model of development culminates in isolated egos centered in powerful, intractable webs of domination. The Kingdom is communal, open to all, diffuse, but intensely personal. Jesus’ extension of the heroic role to all is an evolutionary event; the river of consciousness changes direction as the hero’s role is extended, to be internalized, ingested like bread, and re-enacted in fresh manifestations. I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower . . . Abide in me as I abide in you. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit. (John 15:1–5)

The unity of Jesus and his followers is organic rather than institutional. Like the parts of a plant they grow together, sharing a common life, bearing fruit, planting seeds, offering the wine of sacrifice.

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Jesus knows that his disciples do not understand him, so he promises to send an advocate to be with them. The advocate will be like the “savior,” the defender or go-el that Job hopes to see: “The Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him” (John 14:16). This is the Holy Spirit, God’s wisdom, who will teach them everything. The Spirit is God working in human beings, allowing them to see past the scenery and props of the social consensus. He brings peace. “Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” (John 14:27). “Shalom,” resting in perfect balance, composure, hope. Those who follow the commandment to love become Jesus’ friends and peers: “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (John 15:15). “The world hates them; It hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own” (John 15: 18).

C RUCIFIXION The word “passion,” describing the suffering of Christ, is derived from Latin “passio,” being acted upon—passive. It connotes an experience of helplessness, of being carried away by violent pain—torture, intense and overmastering. The subject has no control; the ego is crushed. Jesus committed himself willingly to undergo this violation and did not shrink from it. In Mark’s account of his death, the first written, he utters a loud, wordless scream and dies on the cross. After the Last Supper, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John to a garden called Gethsemane, on the Mount of Olives, where he is “deeply grieved, even unto death” (Matt. 26:38). The four gospels differ in some details of the passion narrative, but I will try to note the important images in chronological order, where possible. Jesus asks his companions to stay awake with him while he prays: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, but not what I want but what you want.” Jesus uses the diminutive, “Abba,” “Dad” for “father.” He is agonized and wishes to avoid death, but he is willing to accept it as a necessary part of the transformative process lying ahead of him. When he finds his friends sleeping, he asks again that they stay awake and pray: their “spirit is indeed willing but the flesh is weak.” He prays three times that the cup will pass, while the apostles sleep through it all. He is alone. At length he awakens them as

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Judas approaches with an armed mob. The traitor’s secret signal, identifying Jesus, is a kiss. When the men arrest Jesus, Peter pulls his sword and strikes off the ear of the High Priest’s slave. Jesus says, “Put up your sword. For all who take up the sword will perish by the sword.” He could have “twelve legions of angels” if he called for them, but he prefers to let the drama unfold. The disciples all run away. Peter follows at a distance as they take Jesus to the High priest, who is looking for testimony sufficient to condemn Jesus. Finally, two witnesses come forward claiming that Jesus said, “I am able to destroy the Temple of God and to build it in three days.” He is speaking of his body as God’s temple, but they take his saying as a terrorist threat to assault the Temple. When questioned by Caiaphas, Jesus does not answer. His silence is a typological reference to Isaiah’s description of the paschal lamb in the Suffering Servant song: Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. (Is. 53:2–5)

The suffering servant, like the silent lamb or the scapegoat, is “stricken for the transgression of the people.” Jesus’ silence also signifies that his questioners are deaf to anything he might mean. When Caiaphas asks him to say under oath if he is the Messiah, Jesus replies, “You have said so.” This is same sort of ambiguous response he later uses before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. It seems to mean “So you say” (“but you really don’t know what any of this means”). Jesus goes on to quote the apocalyptic book of Daniel describing the Messiah: From now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven. (Dan. 7:13)

The High Priest tears his clothes: “He has blasphemed! Why do we still need witnesses? . . . What is your verdict?” They answer, “He deserves death.” Then they spit in Jesus’ face, strike him, blindfold him, mock him, and slap him, saying “Prophecy to us Messiah! Who is it that slapped you?” (Matt. 26:65–68). Peter’s drama unfolds on the sidelines; a servant girl sees him sitting outside the council building and accuses him of being one of Jesus’ men. He denies it, moves on, and encounters another servant who recognizes him. Again he says, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” A third

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bystander approaches, “Certainly you are one of them, for your accent betrays you.” He curses and swears, “I do not know the man.” At that moment, the cock crows and Peter remembers Jesus’ words. “And he went out and wept bitterly.” When Judas sees that Jesus has been condemned, he repents and returns the thirty pieces of silver he was paid. “I have sinned by betraying an innocent man.” The council replies, “What is that to us?” “Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself” (John 27:5). The priests cannot put the silver in the treasury because it is blood money, so they purchase the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. Matthew (27:9) associates the thirty pieces of silver with Jeremiah 18 and Zechariah 11, both prophetic tirades about money as payoffs and bribes. It is also the price of a slave’s life. If an adult male slave is accidentally killed, the person responsible will pay the sum of thirty pieces of silver to the slave’s owner (Exod. 21:32). Jesus must go before Pilate, the Roman governor, because the Jews are not permitted to put anyone to death. Pilate asks if he is “the King of the Jews.” His response is noncommittal: “You say so.” Pilate is astonished that Jesus does not contest the council’s verdict. “He realized it was out of jealousy that they had handed him over” (Matt. 27:18). His wife sends word to him that she has had a dream about Jesus and warns him to “have nothing to do with this innocent man.” Pilate begins to look for a way out. He continues his line of questioning aimed at finding out if Jesus is making political claims to the throne. “My kingdom is not of this world.” “So you are a king?” Jesus answers, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asks him, “What is truth?” Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life,” but Pilate suspects there is no truth; he is correct at least in thinking that the truth Jesus represents is inaccessible to him. Luke reports that Pilate passed Jesus off to King Herod, because Galilee, Jesus’ home, was in his jurisdiction. Herod had heard many stories about Jesus and was curious. He thought he was a magician and hoped to see him perform a miracle. Jesus’ accusers are there, and Herod and his soldiers mock and abuse him. “That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies” (Luke 23:6–12). The tyrants make friends over the bones of a common enemy. It is Pilate’s custom to release a prisoner to the crowd at Passover. Jesus Barabbas was “in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection” (Mark 15:7). His name, Bar-abbas, means “son of the father.” Pilate shows both Jesus the son of man and Jesus the son of

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the father to the crowd and asks which to release. They cry out “Barabbas” because he is the sort of Messiah they expect. “Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” They shout back, “‘Crucify him!’ ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ They shouted all the more, ‘Crucify him!’” (Mark 15:12). “Fearing that a riot is about to break out, Pilate takes “some water and washes his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourself.’” (Matt. 27:24). Pilate sends Jesus to be scourged by the Roman soldiers who strip, torture, and humiliate their prisoner. They “wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. They kept coming up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and striking him on the face” (John 19:2–3). The Roman feast of Saturnalia, something like Mardi Gras, was a time when all normal restraints were lifted and people acted out their fantasies. A king, a madman, or an imbecile, was selected, dressed in royal robes, carried in procession before kneeling multitudes, then, as the climax of the fool’s holiday, the king was killed. When the soldiers have finished flogging Jesus, they bring him in his purple robe before Pilate and the crowd: “Behold the man!” Ecce Homo. The crowd insists that Pilate crucify him, saying at last, “We have no king but Caesar.” Pilate hands Jesus over to be crucified. The place of crucifixion is Golgotha (the Place of the Skull, “Calvary” in Latin) Jesus carries his own cross for a while, then Simon the Cyrene is drafted to help. Some women of Jerusalem weep for him as he passes, but he says, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but for yourselves and your children.” Pilate has prepared a sign in three languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, to affix to the cross, saying, “Jesus, King of the Jews.” The priests protest, but Pilate will not change the inscription. The soldiers strip Jesus and cast lots to see who will get his clothing (cf. Psalm 22:18: “They divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.”) After he is nailed to the cross between two thieves, Jesus says, “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:24). The crowds continue to taunt him, daring him to come down from the cross. One of the thieves has pity for Jesus because he sees he is an innocent man. He asks Jesus to remember him when he comes into his kingdom. Jesus replies, “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Jesus would have been familiar with crucifixion, as it was a common Roman punishment, especially for insurgents, who were called bandits and thieves. When he was a child, an insurrection occurred in Galilee; the Romans crushed it, and lined the hilltops of the province with rows of crosses. A number of medical studies of crucifixion suggest that death is

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caused by a variety of overlapping traumas—some blood loss, especially from the preparatory flogging; difficulty in breathing caused by hanging suspended by the arms; shock; and heart failure. A strong man could live for many hours, even days, on a cross. Jesus’ experience was mercifully brief. At noon, “darkness came over the whole land until around three in the after noon” (Matt. 27:45). Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eli, eli, lema sabachthani,” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus is quoting the opening line of Psalm 22, a poem that begins in deep despair as the speaker mourns his condition: “But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by the others and despised by the people. All who see me mock me” (Ps. 6–7). The psalm echoes the prophetic descriptions of the Suffering Servant: He had no form or majesty that we should look at him . . . He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity . . . Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions . . . Upon him was the punishment that made us whole. (Is. 53:2–5)

Though Psalm 22 begins in despair, it ends in triumphant praise for God’s mercy, because he does not “despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted.” “I shall live for him, my posterity will serve him.” When the onlookers hear Christ saying “Eli, Eli,” they think he is calling for Elijah. They say, “Let’s see whether Elijah will come to take him down” (Mark 15:36). The crowd understands nothing at all of what Jesus means. Mary, Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene, and one of the other Marys stand with the beloved disciple at the foot of the cross when all of the rest have fled. John records a passage in which Jesus entrusts his mother to John as her son in his place. Mary lives from that hour with John in Jerusalem. The evangelists report Jesus’ last words in several versions. Mark’s gospel, the first and shortest, describes simply a loud cry. Matthew says the same. Luke describes him crying out in a loud voice: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” John’s account of the passion and death is more restrained than the others; Jesus appears calm throughout. When he knows that it is time, he takes a sip of wine held up to him on a sponge and says, “It is finished,” “Consmmatum est.” Then he bows his head and gives up his spirit. At the moment of his death, “the curtain of the temple was

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torn in two, from top to bottom” (Mark 15:38). He speaks of the temple of his body, and it seems that the divine spirit leaves the temple as Jesus’ soul leaves his body. The centurion overseeing the execution says, “Truly this man was God’s son!” (Mark 15:39) In John’s version, the priests do not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Passover Sabbath, so they ask Pilate to have the legs of the crucified men broken. (This will make it more difficult for the men to support themselves to breath while suspended by their arms.) The soldiers break the legs of the two thieves. But they see that Jesus is already dead and do not break his legs. Instead, to ensure death, one of them pierces his side with a spear and blood and water come out, a typological reference to Jesus as the living water. John tells us that the incident also occurred “so the scripture might be fulfilled, ‘None of his bones shall be broken,’” a reference to the Passover lamb (Exod. 12:46; Ps. 34:20).

A NALOGUES TO THE PASSION N ARRATIVE Jesus preaches the Kingdom—an intensification of consciousness that remains out of reach, largely unintelligible two thousand years after his coming. Jesus’ extension of the heroic role to everyone is new, but the Gospel images are not new, in the sense of innovative, nor is their meaning peculiar to a particular historical moment. The story of the death and resurrection of Christ embodies and realizes a universal developmental process. Victor Turner’s study of initiation rites1 outlines the stages of the rites of passage common in the premodern world. It is a sociological study, unlike the narrative analyses we have relied on, but like the hero myths, the rites carry meaning that reflects on the events and symbols of the gospels. Typically, the subjects of the ritual are boys preparing to assume the higher demands of adulthood. Their transformation is vital to the life of the community, and the ritual reflects the difficulties attendant on the passage. When the rites begin, the initiates are withdrawn from the normal activities of life into a “liminal state,” where they are stripped of their old identities. Often they are given symbolic garments, marking them as pilgrims in transit. Various tests follow; they may be required to fast, or to bear pain, or risk danger. Often they are tested on their knowledge of tribal lore. During their time of trial, the tribal members who interact with them typically treat them with a mixture of interest, fear, and contempt; they are often publicly spurned or mocked. (These attitudes can be seen today in initiation rites in the military, fraternal orders, etc.) The process

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seeks to grind down, to wear out the old identity. The initiates are submissive because they have consented to bear the pain. They were born to it. “For this I have come into the world.” In the final stage, they are awarded the secret wisdom of the people of their tribe. Often they are given new names. When they return to the ordinary world, they are strongly bonded to each other, forming a brotherhood, a “Kingdom” based on love. They offer their strength and wisdom like bread and wine, to serve the tribe. The parallels with the passion of Christ are evident. What others enact in ritual he enacted in history. Jesus’ followers are not tribal members; as Abram was called to leave Ur, the disciples must leave their fathers and mothers to enter into a new brotherhood. Group ritual gives way to individual commitment. It is clear that the overall structure of the passion narrative conforms to universal representations of heroic transformation. Even the details are mirrored in other hero stories. The cross, for example, is commonly called “the tree of the cross,” linking it to many images of the World-Tree that grows at the center of the world. It is the axis mundi around which the world turns, a sort of Jacob’s ladder stretching from earth to heaven. Alan W. Watts (1969 157–61) points out that the Tree of Life stands in the center of the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:9–10), and from it flow the four rivers of paradise, forming a watery cross. The medieval “Legend of the Holy Rood” claims that Jesus’ cross was made from the wood of the Tree of Life. Sometimes the tree is said to be at the “world navel,” where human and divine life commingle. In medieval drawings, the “shoot from the rod of Jesse” is portrayed as a small tree growing from Jesse’s navel (Watts 1969, 159). The Algonquin hero, Manabozho, hangs like golden fruit from the World-Tree at his moment of greatest crisis. As in Eden, a serpent is coiled about the foot of the tree. When the ordeal is over, Manabozho creates a new world, a higher kingdom. (Schoolcraft 78–83) Osiris, the Egyptian god, is slain by his evil twin and his body is found within a giant tamarisk tree, used for the central pillar of the temple at Byblos (Watts 1969, 159). Attis, savior god of the Phrygians, son of the virgin Nan, sacrifices himself beneath a pine tree. He is honored in priapic rites in the temple of Cybele, where a pine tree, wrapped in burial bands, is placed in the sanctuary and worshipped on “the day of blood” (Campbell 1968, 143). A Norse legend describes Odin, who hung for nine days on the world tree, called Yggdrasil, to gain wisdom: I know that I hung On a wind-rocked tree

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Nine whole nights, With a spear wounded, And to Odin offered Myself to myself; On that tree Of which no one knows From what root it springs. (Watts, 1968, 159)

Odin, wounded and in the dark, offers himself to himself—a god freely giving himself to enable new revelations, higher wisdom. In the end. Odin gives up one of his eyes in return for his new vision. Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux holy man, has a vision when he is a boy that starts him on the prophetic road. He foresees the fall of his tribe, the breaking of the “hoop of the nation,” and its regeneration. After a terrible passage through four ascents in a wasteland, Black Elk sees a horse, “all skin and bones, a faded brownish black.” A “four-rayed herb” is given to him and he circles the horse, as the people, far away, pray, “a-hey! a-hey!” “Then the poor horse neighed and rolled and got up, and he was a big, shining black stallion with dapples all over him and his mane about him like a cloud.” (41) He is the chief of all horses, and they come as he calls them, “plunging horses without number—whites and sorrels and buckskins, fat, shiny, rejoicing in their fleetness and their strength. It was beautiful but it was also terrible.” Four virgins come from the four corners of the earth into the hoop of the horses. The universe is silent until the black stallion raises his song, and sings it four times. “His voice was not loud, but it went all over the universe and filled it. There was nothing that did not hear and it was more beautiful than anything can be.” The circled horses dance as do the virgins; the leaves on the trees, the waters in the rivers and all living creatures dance to the stallion’s song. When the song is over, a voice tells Black Elk that this new world, this “day of happiness,” is his to make. The hero must make a new heaven and a new earth. These images of restored harmony and life are reminiscent of the prophetic consolations, such as Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. “Son of Man,” God asks, “can these bones live?” The dead hear the word of the Lord, “and suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together” (Ezek. 37:7). The Lord summons the four winds (ruach, spirit) and breath comes into the bones, “and they lived, and stood on their feet, a multitude.” Isaiah describes the restoration of the people in similar apocalyptic terms. “Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise/ O

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dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! / For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead” (Is. 26:19). Black Elk is next taken in his vision to the center of the world, to the highest mountain. It was Harney Peak in the Black Hills, but, as Black Elk said, “Anywhere is the center of the world” (43). From the mountaintop, he sees “the whole hoop of the world”: And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy. (43)

The mighty flowering tree is the cross, seen from the vantage point of the Kingdom. No longer a sign of suffering and death, it becomes the glorious Tree of Life. The hoops of all the nations are linked around the sacred center. Angels, like arrows flying, give Black Elk the four-rayed herb that brings back life. It is “the day-break-star herb, the herb of understanding.” When this cross-shaped herb falls to the ground, like a seed, four blossoms appear, blue, white, scarlet. and yellow. Rays of light stream up to heaven, “so that all creatures saw it and in no place was there darkness.” The herb of understanding signifies the wisdom of a new revelation. From one point of view, the tree of the cross represents life itself (Watts 1968, 160). It is rooted in the unknown and reaches out to the light above. Like the vine and the branches, its many different parts function as an organic whole. But the cruciform shape of the tree also signifies the pain of life in a world of warring opposites; love/hate, past/future/ reward/punishment, pleasure/pain, me/not-me. Humanity is nailed to this cross, torn apart by divergent energies. Ego, in its dualist configuration, is fixed to the fallen world, impaled by fear and desire. Watt mentions a number of figures, like the tar baby, signifying destructive attachments. The more Br’er Rabbit struggles with the tar baby, the more entangled he becomes, like a fly in honey. Ego is beaten—“I” gives up. “Father, into thy hands I commit my soul.” “It is finished.” The rite of passage involves a descent into darkness and unknowing, but in the final stage, a new identity emerges. The Son of Man can contain the terrible oppositional pull of the world. He is the center, the still point. “When I am lifted up I will draw all people to me.” Jesus stands in the center of the hoop, and he sings a new song, beautiful but terrible.

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The tree is the axis of the world, a crossroads of time and space. It becomes a radiant throne; in medieval art, the risen Christ lifts his hand in blessing, centered on the cross with an aureole of light radiating from its center. Sinners “miss the mark”; in the Kingdom, the glorious cross is the mark, the target. It is the eye of the needle, the strait and narrow gate by which one enters the Kingdom.

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n the evening of Jesus’ death, Joseph of Arimathea, a council member and a disciple of Jesus, went to Pilate to ask for the body for burial: Pilate wondered if he were already dead, and summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he had been dead for some time. When he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. (Mark 15: 43–45)

Because it is the day before the Sabbath, there is no time for funeral rites, so Joseph wraps the body in a linen cloth, and lays it in a tomb hewn from rock, rolling a stone in front of the door. Mary Magdalene and the other women see where the body is laid. All four resurrection narratives begin when Mary goes, on the third day, to anoint the body for burial. The stories vary in small ways, but all are detailed and the rhetoric reflects an effort at accuracy. The narrative of the passion and death of Christ rings true as a factual account. We have little reason to doubt or be surprised by reports of treachery, political intrigue, and brutality associated with the execution of a suspected insurrectionist. Those events meet the test of experience. The tale of someone rising from the dead is another matter. Each evangelist, in his own way, acknowledges the implausibility of resurrection, while developing rhetorical strategies for assuring the reader that it truly happened— that something amazing truly happened. The first written account of the resurrection is in Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 1:15, about 54 CE). Paul describes the appearances to the apostles and Jesus’ other close followers but also cites many other

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witnesses, saying that Jesus appeared to “more than five hundred brothers and sisters, most of whom are still alive.” Citing numerous live witnesses suggests that the resurrection appearances were widely attested to at that time. Mark’s version of the resurrection, the first written gospel, is less definite and so short that it appears to be unfinished. Two other endings (16:9) not by the author of Mark, have been added and are included in the canon. Mark says that when the Sabbath is over Mary Magdalene and another Mary go at dawn to the tomb with oil and spices to prepare the body for proper burial. “Who will roll the stone away for us?” they wonder. When they arrive, they find the stone rolled away and a “young man, dressed in a white robe,” sitting inside: Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you. (Mark 16:6)

The women “went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” This was the original ending of the book of Mark. It reflects the fear and confusion those closest to Jesus experienced when told he had arisen from the dead. There is no closure here, and no further details are offered. Matthew’s version adds a telling detail about the priests and Pharisees going to Pilate, asking that he set a guard on the tomb: That imposter said while he was still alive, “I am to be raised again after three days . . . ” His disciples may come and steal the body, and tell the people, “He has been raised from the dead,” and the last deception would be worse than the first. (Matt. 7:63)

Pilate gives permission, and they seal the tomb and set a guard of soldiers. In the aftermath of the resurrection, the priests and elders devised a plan to give a large sum of money to the soldiers, telling them “You must say that his disciples came by night and stole him away while you were asleep. If this comes to the governor’s ears we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story is still told among the Jews to this day. (Matt. 28:12)

One obvious explanation for the empty tomb is that the apostles stole the body. Matthew sets up a counter-story that the authorities tried a cover-up

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based on bribing the guards. It is as if he reassures the readers that he recognizes the plausibility of the priests’ story but refutes it in detail. The evangelists record a variety of responses to the early reports of the resurrection. In Matthew, the women run from the tomb not in terror, but in “fear and great joy.” Luke tells us that the disciples regard the women’s story “as an idle tale, and they do not believe them” (Luke 24:11). John describes Mary Magdalene, alone, weeping outside the tomb (John 20:11). She sees two angels and thinks they are thieves who have stolen the body. At that moment, she sees a man whom she supposes to be the gardener. “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away.” Neither Mary nor the disciples show the least expectation of resurrection. The man replies, “Mary,” and she recognizes him as Jesus. “Rabbouni” (teacher) she replies. She clings to him, but he says, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Mary clings to the Jesus she knows, but he has been transformed. As he told his disciples, his death is an essential part of the Way. “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.” At the Last Supper, he tells his followers, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate (Holy Spirit) will not come to you, but if I go I will send him to you” (John 16:7). In Luke’s gospel, the first to see the risen Christ are two of his discouraged disciples who are walking home from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Jesus joins them, “but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” He asks what they are talking about and Cleopas asks, rather sarcastically, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened in these days?” “What things?” The men describe Jesus’ death, and their great disappointment that he was not, after all, the Messiah. They also report on the women’s astonishing claims about angels at the tomb and the missing body. Jesus tells them they are misinterpreting the whole event. It was “necessary that the Messiah should suffer before he enters into his glory.” He then interprets scripture, beginning with Moses, and applies all the types to himself. They do not recognize him, but their “hearts are burning within them” as he explains the Bible. They beg him to eat with them; “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed it and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight” (Luke 24:30). They know him in the breaking of the bread, a signature gesture. In John’s account Mary Magdalene tells the apostles about the empty tomb, and Peter and John race each other to the spot; John, the younger man, reaches the tomb first but defers to Peter, a comment on Peter’s role

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in the community. John follows Peter into the tomb and believes immediately in the resurrection. The evangelist tells us “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9). In Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ appearances to the assembled disciples, they are “startled and terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost” (Luke 24:37). He reassures them, asking them to touch him, “for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” He asks for food and eats a piece of broiled fish as further proof that he is present in the flesh. “Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures”: telling them “the Messiah is to suffer, and to rise from the dead.” A similar scene is recorded in John, when Jesus comes to the disciples who are together in a locked room for fear of the authorities. He shows them the wounds in his hands and feet and side, and breathes on them, imparting the Holy Spirit of wisdom. Thomas, one of the twelve, is absent and refuses to believe the testimony of the others. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails . . . I will not believe” (John 20:25). Again, the evangelist reinforces the difficulty of believing in the resurrection. A week later, Jesus appears when doubting Thomas is present and invites him to touch his wounds. Thomas, stunned, replies, “My Lord and my God!” “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” The last appearance in John’s gospel occurs by the sea of Tiberius where Peter and the others are fishing but catch nothing. At dawn, they see a man whom they do not recognize standing on the beach. He advises them to cast the net to the right side of the boat. They do so and catch so many fish that they cannot haul in the net. Ashore they see that he has built a charcoal fire to cook the fish. “Now none of the disciples dared to ask him ‘Who are you?’ because they knew it was the Lord” (John 20:12). Peter counts the fish, and there are one hundred and fifty three.1 In a reference to the Eucharist and the multiplication of loaves and fishes, Jesus breaks bread with the apostles and serves them the fish. Matthew’s gospel concludes with the eleven remaining apostles traveling to a mountaintop in Galilee. Jesus appears, and “they worshipped him” (“prostrated themselves in worship”) “but some doubted” (Matt. 28:18). Jesus tells them to “make disciples of all nations . . . And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Luke 24 adds that Jesus “opened their minds” to understand the typology in scripture. “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up to heaven. And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God” (Luke 24:51–53). John tells us that “There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one

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of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” John’s gospel opens with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” By the end of the account, the single word has multiplied and grown into more books, more meaning, than the world can contain. The living word bears fruit in innumerable lives. The events of Pentecost, described in the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 2, conclude the resurrection narrative. The Book of Acts, a history of the early church, tells us that the risen Jesus spent forty days (meaning many days, as in the forty years in the desert) presenting himself and his teachings to the apostles before ascending to heaven. He tells his followers to await baptism by the spirit in Jerusalem. The apostles were together on Pentecost, the feast celebrating the giving of the Law to Moses: Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:2–4)

The wind, like the wind sweeping the face of the waters in Genesis 1, is the divine spirit making a new world. The fiery tongues reflect the burning bush of the revelation to Moses. Pentecost marks the emergence of the Kingdom in the postresurrection era. Like baptism, it is a liminal event transforming the apostles, bringing new capacities for wisdom and speech. A crowd of pious Jews from all parts of the Empire has assembled in Jerusalem for the feast. Each can hear the apostles speaking in his own native language. It is a reversal of the chaotic breakdown in speech at the Tower of Babel. Humanity is here brought together in heartfelt understanding. Again, though, some people hear nothing, and sneer: “They [the apostles] are filled with new wine.” Jesus’ message is for those who are prepared to hear it. He could not perform miracles where he was not accepted, and he did not appear in risen form to everyone, but only to those who would recognize him. In the logos format, truth is thought to be objective, the same for everyone. In fact, all perceptions are shaped by cultural expectations, cognitive abilities, and angle of vision. Even scientific theories, though based on observation, calculation, and experimentation, change over time. Consider the differing theories of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and current string theory. Each works in its own way, but none is entirely compatible with the others. The aptitude for understanding the truth of the Kingdom varied among the hearers: it is the

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product of choices and commitments. One must pass through an initiation, a transformative commitment of will. Peter rises at Pentecost to defend the apostles from the accusation of being drunk. His language is apocalyptic, suggesting that they are drunk on the new wine of messianic expectation. They speak with fiery tongues to those who can hear, to fulfill the prophecy of Joel (2:28): In the last days it will be, God declares, That I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, And your sons and your daughters shall prophecy And your young men shall see visions And your old men shall dream dreams.

Pentecost associates the resurrection with the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Trinitarian doctrine is notoriously abstruse, but St. Augustine’s model illuminates some of the mystery of the triune God. The Trinity is an image or model of divine revelation; generating meaning is a three-part process. The first element is reality—a real thing (object, process, idea) to be communicated. The second is the icon or symbol standing for the reality. The third is the delivery of the message, the reception and decoding of the icon. The Father is the Creator God. He is everything that is, a boundless activity. And He knows himself. The risen Christ is the Word, the archetypal pattern of meaning unfolding in human consciousness. Christ is “the reflection of God’s glory, and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word” (Heb. 1:3). By enacting the pattern of death and rebirth he translates the divine word into human modes of knowing. In the Word, “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17), rendering them coherent and meaningful. When people hear the message, recognize the correspondence between the Father and the Son, God’s glory, the Holy Spirit, is poured out. He “alights” on people and fills them with joy, the bliss of knowing and saying and being the Word. They get the message, and “speak in tongues,” that is, each reflects and intones the universal harmony of the Word. In the end-times, the Holy Spirit or breath of God will animate all people. Acts tells us that about three thousand people were baptized on Pentecost. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread together at home and ate their food with glad and generous

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hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day, the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. (Acts

2:41) “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” (1 Cor. 15:14)

Readers ask, “Did it really happen?” The Evangelists reply, “Something really happened, but we don’t understand it.” Jesus assures his disciples that he is neither a disembodied ghost nor a zombie. Many details in the resurrection narratives emphasize that this was not a literal resuscitation like that described in the story of Lazarus. Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognize Jesus, neither do the men on the road to Emmaus, nor the disciples fishing in the boat. He comes and goes through locked doors, but he is not a disembodied spirit, as he emphasizes by eating and permitting them to touch him. The apostles do not believe Mary’s initial report, and Thomas does not believe his comrades. Luke denies the story that the body was stolen but presents it as an explanation that reasonable people might accept. The apostles acknowledge that their encounter with the risen Christ is simply inexplicable in terms of common experience. Hebrews compares him to the mysterious King Melchizedek of Genesis 14. Abraham worships with the stranger, who is “without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life,” (Heb. 7:3) a figure hovering at the limits of perception. Paul, whose epistles were written before the gospels, addresses himself to the nature of the risen body (1 Cor. 15:35–44): But some will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.

The risen body is the exfoliation or antitype of the living person. In its intensity, it expresses all that was latent, all of goodness that was possible in the bare seed of the living body. It is an icon expressive of an entire life, all the meaning drawn to a single brilliant focus—a reply from the self to God. Each is a unique glory. There are “both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies . . . There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; and indeed star differs from star in glory.” Many glories stream from the same light. “So it is with the resurrection of

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the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable” (1 Cor. 15:35–42). The resurrection of Jesus is the antitype of ritual initiation. Rites of passage, marking the onset of a new phase of identity are, in their nature, mysterious to those who have not been initiated. But transformation is a basic rule of life. Each fetus ascends the chain of evolution in the womb; each person recapitulates the stages of development from infancy—complete immersion in the unconscious, followed by ascent to the instinctive level of childhood, through the narcissism of adolescence, to the workings of the adult ego. The child thinks as a child and has little understanding of the motivations and rules of adulthood. Civilization evolves from huntergatherer societies, to agricultural settlements, then urban civilizations and science-based Western society. Each stage of cultural evolution has brought increased concentrations of power and further development of the ego as the center of consciousness. Isolation, self-absorption, and defensiveness increasingly characterize the ego. The resurrection, the risen body, signals a change in direction, a new way of being human. The modern ego is a sort of chrysalis, a forsaken shell, drying in the sun of a new light: “One day, perhaps, a child will come, / Will ask its mother, / ‘What strange creature one day lived/ In such a tiny home?’” (Treya Wilber; Vardey 1996, 555). Narratives from every sort of culture, every level of sophistication, depict the death and resurrection of the hero, signifying the advent of new revelation. Images of metamorphosis, of moving from one kind of life to another, are a standard part of the mythic apparatus. We see it in Ovid’s work, in Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole, in Neo’s escape from collective illusion. Job’s experience in the whirlwind is a type of overwhelming vision: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5). The narrative pattern represents profound change because transformations of consciousness are the long-term truth of our species. Recognizing new configurations of consciousness is always very difficult. Imagine the confusion of a person, deaf from birth, who suddenly hears Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Sound is only noise. Nothing in his experience has prepared him to recognize the beauty of the music. A nineteenth-century book, called Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott, uses a memorable metaphor to describe the conceptual barriers to grasping realities outside the limit of one’s own experience. The flatland of the title is a twodimensional world, in which the citizens are geometric shapes, moving over a plane surface. They are triangles, or squares, or pentagons, in a rising hierarchy of importance. One day a sphere impacts the plane. Mr. A.

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Square observes its arrival first as a dot, a mere point, of no significance. Then, as the sphere passes through the plane surface, growing larger then diminishing and finally disappearing, the three-dimensional figure appears to Mr. Square to be a divine vision. He is stunned by the circular shape and at a loss because he cannot imagine up or down. Nothing in his experience has prepared him for the three-dimensional reality of the sphere. “No one can see the face of God and live.” Scripture presents us with a basic recognition that the divine reality exceeds the measures of human comprehension. In one of his letters to Hawthorne, Herman Melville describes the effect of a heartfelt experience of the sacred, whether direct or mediated through others; such truth, he says, “is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning” (letter to Hawthorne, November, 1851). We set nets of words to capture the mighty wind, but the spirit moves as it will. The stages of biblical myth—the Garden of Eden, the fallen world, the Mosaic Law, the Kingdom and risen life—parallel the hero myth and represent the metamorphosis of consciousness. Each is a further interiorization, a deeper assimilation of wisdom. “I will put my law within them; I will write it on their hearts” (Jer. 31:33). Each ascent is like waking from a dream. Paul says: When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Cor. 13: 11–12)

In the New Testament, the risen body of Christ is the mystical body, the vine and the branches. Risen life is shared life, a communal intensification, a new and unimaginable inflection of consciousness. After reading Hawthorne’s letter praising Moby Dick, Melville replied, “I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper and we are the pieces” (Nov. 1851, 452). Paul described the early church in organic terms, as “one body.” (1 Cor. 12:4–27). “There are varieties of gifts, but the same spirit.” All, in their own way, manifest the divine spirit “for the common good.” Some are prophets, others healers, or teachers. They are one body and many members, each member retaining integrity. “For in one spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all made to drink one spirit.”

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The body does not consist of one member, but of many. If the ear would say “because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would hearing be? As it is, there are many members, but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” (1 Cor. 12:16–21)

Many varieties of knowing and doing commingle in the body of Christ. The eye and the ear present very different reports but, when coordinated, allow a fuller view of reality than is possible from any single vantage point. Like Jesus’ image of the vine and the branches, all the parts of the body, though different, share a common life. “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it.” “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:26–27). The world organizes people around the principle of power. Underlings are marshaled to serve the elites. The body of Christ is a return to the tribal garden, where people took care of each other as if the life of every member depended on the welfare of all members. Which it did. The true body nourishes each member, honors all, while recognizing individual gifts. In biblical geography, cities and empires are evil: Ur, Sodom, Egypt, Babylon, Rome—committed to the exercise of power, they are selfdevouring, cancerous. The Garden, the Promised Land, the Temple, and the Kingdom are sacred havens where manna falls and the bread of life is broken and shared.

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he apocalyptic strain in Christianity has caused no end of trouble because it is often developed in literal terms. St. Augustine opposed including John’s Book of Revelations in the canon but agreed to accept it as long as it was made clear that it was to be understood on a “spiritual” rather than a “carnal” level (i.e., symbolic rather than literal). As the millennial year 2000 approached, various cults in America and abroad prepared to meet the end in their own ways: the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate movement, Jim Jones’ poisoned Kool-Aid, the Branch Davidian stand-off in Waco. These events are small scale compared with the enormous historical movements, good and bad, rooted in millennial expectations. Pope Urban II sent out the Crusaders in 1095 to face off against the Antichrist because the Second Coming is expected to occur in Jerusalem. Christopher Columbus wrote: “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John” (Weber 1999, 168). The Puritans built a “City on a Hill” in New England to be ready for the “end of days.” Cotton Mather loved to speculate on Christ’s return, reading “the signs of the times” (Sheler 1997, 66). Apocalyptic expectations have shaped the recent history of the Middle East: In 1891, for example, a petition signed by over four hundred eminent Americans, including Cyrus McCormick, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, urged President Benjamin Harrison to advance ‘the purpose of God concerning his ancient people’ by supporting the cause of a Jewish state in Palestine. (Weber 1999, 133)

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Today’s Rapture movement, evidenced by the runaway success of the novels by Tim La Haye, focuses strong fundamentalist religious lobbying power on America’s foreign policy. Bill Moyers reports that many Christian fundamentalists are convinced that “Once Israel has occupied the rest of its ‘biblical lands’ legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.” Some adherents expect that the Saints will be carried off bodily to heaven just as the Antichrist attacks. There will then be a nuclear confrontation in the Middle East, which will be averted by the Second Coming of Christ. Many sincere believers regard themselves as called by God to bring about the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. As Moyers points out: It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm up act predicted in the book of Revelations, where four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of mankind.” A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed. (Moyers 2005, 2)

It is easy enough to laugh at the “rapture index” (a Christian web site that bills itself as a “Dow-Jones industrial average of end-time activity”) or bumper stickers that say “Beam me up, Lord,” but in fact, a sizable portion of the American electorate hopes for and works quietly toward the development of just such a nuclear scenario. In the first century CE the Roman Empire was rife with apocalyptic expectations. Gnostics, Hellenists, Jews, Christians, mystery religions everywhere believed literally that the world would soon go up in flames in a confrontation between the forces of light and dark. The coming Messiah and the apocalyptic triumph of good were closely linked in Jewish and Christian thought. Certainly, Paul’s message is deeply influenced by these currents, and all the Gospels anticipate the Second Coming of Christ. Albrt Schweitzer’s influential study, Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906–61), depicted Jesus as an eschatological zealot, a deranged preacher who induced his followers to martyr themselves to usher in the New Age. Jesus mentions the apocalypse (it would have been an unavoidable topic in that milieu), but he seems to seek to minimize the expectations of his followers, insisting that absolutely no one knows when it will occur. He disassociates himself from the messianic movement in Israel, which expected the fall of Rome and the restoration of Israelite sovereignty. In Matthew 24, he warns that false messiahs will lead people astray. If someone says, “‘Look! He is in the wilderness.’ Do not go out . . . do not believe it.” He

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quotes a mixture of Isaiah (13:10) and Ezekiel (32:7): “The sun will be darkened / and the moon will not give its light, / the stars will fall from heaven / and the powers of heaven will be shaken.” Then he assures his listeners: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matt. 24:36). In spite of these injunctions, the faithful in every age have looked for the “signs of the times”: wars, earthquakes, comets, that might predict the apocalypse. Inevitably, the Gospels reflect apocalyptic concerns, but John’s Book of Revelations fails to reflect major gospel concerns. We hear very little in the Apocalypse about love for neighbors or enemies, compassion for the poor, turning the other cheek, or the many signature paradoxes structuring the gospel message. The beatitudes and the lessons of the parables are forgotten in concerns about the end-times. In Luke, Jesus precedes his description of the Apocalypse by contrasting it with the Kingdom. “The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; Nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For in fact, the Kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:20–21). Many translations read, “The Kingdom is within you,” or “right there in your presence” (Harris 2000, 441). Jesus’ concerns are not with the end-times, but with the Kingdom, in its interior aspects and its social manifestations. The word “apocalypse,” “unveiling” in Greek, means not the end of the world, but the revelation of the Kingdom. Its images of catastrophic violence correspond to painful internal changes. The Book of Revelations can be read as a form of wisdom literature, like Job; it deals with experiences just past the reach of intelligibility. The familiar world generated by power and social conditioning slips aside, and we glimpse an emerging truth rising from love and a capacity for detachment from fear and desire. Despite the distortions induced by literal readings, Revelations tells its own story, employing the elements of the hero myth in a very striking and meaningful narrative. Christ appears as the fiery prince, defeating dragons and empires, rescuing and marrying the fair princess. The appearance of the new Jerusalem, a virgin universe, is a fitting conclusion to the epic that began in the Garden. The Book of Revelations was written in the ’90s by John of Patmos (John the Divine), an itinerant Christian visionary who was imprisoned for a time on the Isle of Patmos. Like other apocalyptic works, the narrative relies on colorful, sometimes bizarre, imagery to describe the battle between the forces of light and darkness, whether understood as a literal clash or as an interior struggle. The agon ends in the revelation of a new world. The writing is sometimes deliberately obscure, as in John’s portrait of the

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“Whore of Babylon” who is an encoded picture of the Roman Empire. The writer is heavily influenced by Hellenistic gematria, a system of reading numbers as occult codes; mysterious twelves and sevens structure events. “Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the speaker says.” The text is meant to be secret, intelligible only to the initiates. John’s contemporary readers probably found it almost as ambiguous and difficult as modern readers do. John’s vision begins: “The time is near.” The son of Man will return. The Lord announces, “I am the Alpha and Omega” (1:18), the beginning and end of all words, all meaning. He is, was, and will be: a presence past all shadow of change, past all time. John offers a series of warnings and blessings to his seven churches aimed at preparing them to be perfect as the end approaches. Those who are faithful will receive “a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it” (2:17). The renaming signifies a rite of passage into a more deeply realized self. In Chapter 4, the narrator sees a throne in heaven where God holds a scroll sealed with seven seals. Only the lamb is worthy to open the seals. The living lamb appears “standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes,” symbols of power and wisdom. The twentyfour elders “sing a new song,” representing the dawn of a new order. Four horsemen appear as the first seals are broken. The first is the warrior Christ, the others represent war and famine; the last, a pale rider, is death. When the other seals are broken, “The sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree drops its winter fruit” (5:12–130). Then, “the sky vanished like a scroll rolling itself up.” The earth and heavens are revealed as mere stage scenery, of no weight or depth. The lost Ark of the Covenant reappears, amid thunder and lightning, harbored in the restored heavenly temple (11:19). Chapter 12 introduces the first of three archetypal women; she is “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” She is pregnant and indeed is giving birth. A red dragon with seven heads and ten horns seeks to devour her son, but the child is taken to God’s throne and the woman flees to safety in the desert. She is not named, but most scholars believe her to represent Israel, the mother of the Messiah, crowned with the stars of the twelve tribes, pursued by the Beast, Rome: “War broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated . . . The great dragon was thrown down, that

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ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Rev. 12:7–9). Ha-Satan, the accuser or prosecutor, appearing in the opening chapters of the Book of Job as a member of God’s court, has changed over the intervening centuries into a cosmic spirit of evil, a rival and counterforce to God’s goodness. He is still, however, associated with lies and illusions. In Job, he promoted the mistaken notion that people act only in systems of reward and punishment, based on fear and desire. They will not sacrifice themselves for anyone or anything. In Luke 4, he tempts Jesus with physical comforts and power in an attempt to lead him astray from his authentic role. In John’s gospel, Jesus calls the devil the “father of lies . . . There is no truth in him” (8:44). In the Apocalypse, he is an apologist, a propagandist, a spin-doctor for the powers of the fallen world. His terrible powers lie in his abilities to subvert the new revelation proper to the Kingdom. The second woman is the Whore of Babylon, clothed in scarlet and purple, riding on the back of the beast, drunk with the blood of the saints. She is Rome, “the great city that rules over the kings of the Earth” (17:18). The woman appears as part of a group of monsters and false prophets, including the “Antichrist,” variously identified as Nero, the Pope, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and so on. The word Antichrist does not appear in Revelation, but only in John’s first epistle (1 John 2:18), where the term describes multiple enemies of Christ.1 “Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard, the antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come.” Many fundamentalists believe that before the battle starts, the elect will be carried alive to heaven in the “rapture.” Again, the word rapture does not appear in Revelations, nor is it specifically described, but the concept is probably based on a passage from one of Paul’s epistles: For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. (1 Thess. 4:16–17)

Another likely source for Rapture doctrine is Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the

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trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. (1 Cor. 15:50)

Since a number of different battles are mentioned in Revelations, opinions differ as to when the Rapture will occur. The beast (Roman Empire) marks everyone, rich and poor, on the hand or forehead, “so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark . . . This calls for wisdom; let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty six” (13:16–18). “Of countless explanations, the most probable is ‘Neron Caesar,’ in Hebrew letters” (NRSV, Oxford, 438). A second possibility relates the number to the many statues of Julius Caesar put up in every conquered territory. “Veni, Vidi, Vici,” “I came, I saw, I conquered,” was carved on the base and abbreviated “Vi Vi Vi.” In Latin numerals, six, six, six. Some fundamentalists regard the number as representing bar codes that the Antichrist will cause to be embedded in the hands of the enslaved people of the earth. David Fideler2, an expert in ancient cosmology and gemetria, relates 666 to a mathematical figure called the “Magic Square of the Sun,” a table of the first thirty-six numbers, arranged in a square, “in such a fashion so that each line of numbers, whether added horizontally, vertically or diagonally from corner to corner, will yield the ‘solar number,’ one hundred and eleven (see note 2). The entire magic square therefore equals six hundred and sixty six” (31). The descriptions of Roman corruption that follow are much like the diatribes of the prophets against earlier empires and the unfaithful leaders of Israel. The merchants of the earth have grown rich from the excess of Roman luxury. The “Whore of Babylon” lives in wealth and thinks, “I rule as a queen. I am no widow, and I will never see grief” (Rev. 18:7). When Rome falls, the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn for her, since no one will buy their choice cargo any more. “Myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves—and human lives” (Rev. 18:11). The battle of Armageddon begins in Chapter 16:16, and it concludes when the Christ appears as hero. “Then I saw heaven opened and there was a white horse! Its rider is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war” (Rev. 19:11). The names Faithful and True emphasize the integrity and reality of the Word of God. His eyes are like flames, and “he has a name inscribed that no one knows but himself.” The hidden name suggests the emergence of a further realization of meaning. White-robed armies of angels follow the Word, and “from his mouth

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comes a sharp sword,” a truth that will destroy the illusory constructs of the beast. An angel calls to the birds of carrion, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains.” Another angel seizes the dragon, “that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and locked and sealed it over him, so that he would deceive the nations no more, until the thousand years were ended” (Rev. 20:2–3). The millennium, a time of peace and virtue, will end with a brief and decisive struggle after which Satan and his followers will be cast into hell for eternity. The last judgment is to occur at this point. “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened . . . and the dead were judged according to their works” (Rev. 20:12): Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Rev. 21:1–2)

The bride, New Jerusalem, is “clothed with fine linen, bright and pure, For the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints” (19:8). Unlike the Whore of Babylon, the bride’s beauty is in action rather than possessions. She is adorned with the deeds, choices, commitments of the faithful. “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” The Messianic union of the human and divine is often represented in the archetype of the royal marriage. As perennial bridegroom, the hero passes through death to save his princess/soul. He is the seed falling into fertile ground, multiplying life. Though myth usually presents the archetypes of the masculine and feminine as two distinct figures, the bride represents the hero’s final self-manifestation. The world as we experience it ends in the Apocalypse: God and humanity brought together in “one flesh,” an inseparable, generative self-recognition. The bride of the Apocalypse, humanity, fully realized, perfected in the acts of the saints, is a type of God’s delight, the Sophia figure in Proverbs 8, “rejoicing before him always.” She is the first word, God’s initial self-expression. Her role is to mediate divine meaning in human terms. Isaiah describes Israel as the Bride, to be restored after exile. “Do not fear, says the Lord, for your maker is your husband” (Is. 54:5–58). In the Apocalypse. the appearance of the bride is followed by an image of humanity’s metamorphosis. John falls to his knees to worship an angel

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messenger, “but he said to me, ‘You must not do that. I am a fellow servant with you and your comrades.’” And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, And God himself will be with them; He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; Mourning and crying and pain will be no more, For the first things have passed away. (Rev. 21:1–4)

The figure on the throne declares, “See, I am making all things new . . . It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.” When the Lord says, “See, I am making all things new,” the parameters of reality shift as the Apocalypse or unveiling occurs. The bride is described as a shining city coming down from heaven. “It has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal” (Rev. 21:11). Every detail emphasizes light and clarity—“Clear as crystal.” “The city is pure gold, clear as glass,” a transparent treasure. The gates of the New Jerusalem are inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel (Rev. 21:12), and its living foundation stones are the twelve apostles (Rev. 21:12–14). “The twelve gates are twelve pearls,” symbols of purity and of the soul. “The street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass.” John tells us that he sees no temple in the city, “For its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev. 21–22). In the new reality, forms and rituals give way to face to face encounters—higher orders of experience. “The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Rev. 21:23). In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light!” In the last pages of the New Testament, first light and last light come full circle, directly from God’s Word, without the need of intermediary suns and moons. Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messianic kingdom concludes “the earth will be full of the Knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Rev. 1:19). This flood of wisdom is linked to the water of life, “bright as crystal,” flowing from the throne through the middle of the street. “On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit” (Rev. 22:2). The tree, forbidden to Adam in the garden, has multiplied, offering varieties of life to all who will accept it. God’s servants will “see his face and

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his name will be on their foreheads”—a mutual recognition, a self-recognition, the human and the divine knowing each other at last, face to face. “See, I am coming soon,” the epilogue assures the reader (Rev. 22:6–21). As in Chapter 1 of Revelations, Jesus says “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the first and last, the beginning and the end. The entire alphabet of meaning is perpetually present to the one to whom it has been revealed. The book ends with the cry “Maranatha,” “Come, Lord Jesus!”

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4 THE KINGDOM

Speech, the arts, and worship arrived as a burst of light. An interior sun

rose, beginning with the first spoken word, when the human species made the leap from instinctive awareness to representative thought. This kind of meaning occurs when a speaker devises a verbal sign (or a gesture, picture, etc.) to communicate to a hearer (or viewer). The sign is not the reality it represents, nor is it the same as a sense experience of the object. The universe is full of potential meanings, but this particular kind exists only as the product of interactive, conscious communication. Meaning is the first fruit of the fully human mind. It is our signature creation. Like God’s word, speech creates a new universe. We began to tell stories, creating mental/verbal replicas of the outer world, re-creating and adding to its rhythms and shapes. What was outside is also inside. The order and complexity of the physical world can be abstracted, assimilated by the mind and reproduced, multiplying meaning in the minds of others. Dance, poetry, drawing, and rituals reiterate nature’s patterns, the order of the waves and flying birds. As a species, we are possessed by the creative rhythm, increasing the tempo, ad-libbing, turning up the volume. Consciousness is fertile; every poem, every idea, theory, and equation is a seed of the cosmos, reproducing itself in a flow of signification. The inner capacity to figurate the outer world, to give it a new birth in signs, created an irresistible beauty. A desire to possess the great holy order of the universe and to be possessed by it outweighed the common passions for love and even life. Worship was the response to this stunning recognition of the universe ensouled by order. The cosmos is not blank, not random, but ordered as an integral, living unity. It is a True universe, invested with meaning when the word was spoken. More meaning than

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our minds can bear, but beautiful and good and true. That final truth is the goal of mythos. Certainly, the Kingdom has not yet come. Whatever it may signify in eternity, in time, it is yet impromptu and sporadic at best. In its concrete embodiment, it is a kinetic reality, an ongoing but hidden activity. The Kingdom is a communitarian world based on extending love and care to all. Yet, it is also a deeply personal revelation. As Stephen Mitchell observes, “It is a condition that has no plural, but only infinite singulars” (1991, 13). In its fullness, the Kingdom comes as revelation, a radical realignment of consciousness. The monomyth, or heroic narrative, after all the dragons are slain, is about coming to a new world of meaning, a transparent universe. John’s images of the shining city and the revelation of the alpha and omega of meaning are splendid expressions of first-century expectations of enlightenment. Every age expects the apocalypse and casts it in its own terms. Some of the most interesting contemporary thought frames the revelation of the Kingdom in terms of emergence theory and the exponential increase in information technology. Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution, for example, looks at human enhancement projects based on genetic modifications, robotics, and nanoparticles; they are “intermingling and feeding on one another, and they are collectively creating a curve of change unlike anything we humans have ever seen” (2005, 4). Garreau points out that modern humanity begins with speech. When we “learned to do ‘what-if’s’ in our head, we rapidly surpassed natural evolution. We discovered we could solve many problems thousands of times faster than nature could” (Garreau 2005, 72). Time speeded up. The printing press, he notes, stands at the beginning of the modern age as a new conduit for information essential to the growth of technology. Today’s “engineered evolution” brings us, Garreau says, to “an inflection point in history” (2005, 6). We stand, he thinks, at a point of emergence comparable to tool-making and the harnessing of fire. Harold Morowitz, in The Emergence of Everything (2002), applies the insights of emergence theory to the current evolutionary unfolding of human potential. Emergence attempts to account for the appearance of “variety, novelty and increasing complexity” against the background of the unchanging laws of science (20). Like Garreau, Morowitz sees humanity at a crossroads. “There will be a new emergence and we will play a part in what that emergence is. That is our destiny” (178). Like the Kingdom, the coming world, yet unknown, will be shaped by our choices and sustained by our actions. Ego, the urgent need to control, will give way to the scriptural Kingdom of compassion and wisdom to be earned by patient love.

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“God is love,” the Scriptures say (1 John 4:16) “Little children, let us love not in word or speech, but in truth and action” (1 John 3:18). This transition from individualism to communitarian love parallels the period of great religious change that Karen Armstrong calls the “Axial Age.” Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and Islam emphasize love as a reaction against the brutal egoism of the ancient empires that swept tribal life aside. Myth study tells us that narratives end when the hero makes a new world, a Kingdom, rising on the ruins of the lost Garden. The coming Kingdom is a kinetic reality, a new world created by action. Wallace Stevens asks if “gorgeous nonsense” like “nobility” or “innocence” has any meaning in the modern context (1955b, 4). The poet notes that the archetypes, the “supreme fictions” carry the meanings without which we cannot endure life. But the archetypes are difficult to sustain. “Nobility,” like freedom, is never disembodied but exists in the doing, like singing and dancing. In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” (1955a, 128) Stevens describes a woman walking along the shore, singing, and the poet knows “There never was a world for her / Except the one she sang, and singing, made” (lines 41–42, 130). The singer’s “blessed rage for order” represents the kinetic order of the Kingdom, not a solo performance, but sustained like a song by a chorus of singers. In the Kingdom, faith is not an opinion, or a suspension of disbelief; semper fidelis, heroic faith, means a commitment to be faithful to one’s own vision and conscience. Heroic action renders virtue a reality, a world born from unconditional and painful fidelity. Many twentieth-century writers describe a rising cosmos generated by acts of will. Logos is at home in the old world, spinning equations using fixed realities, discrete objects as its terms. It posits a “found” reality. In the words of physicist David Bohm, the mechanical order is composed of “independently existent parts interacting blindly through forces they exert on each other” (1986, 13). Thing are what they are: truth is the acquisition and analysis of accurate information leading to useful outcomes. Bohm suggests an alternative, an unfolding “implicate order,” a reflection of a world in process, partly found, but partly made. In this kingdom, the most important realities—love, fidelity, innocence, virtue—exist only as long as people make them real. As the history of the twentieth century shows, social justice is realized by struggle and sacrifice. Neither coincidence nor the flow of the status quo brings it into being. Frederick Douglass observed: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress . . . Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and never will.” Liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez tells us that the struggle ends not merely with a higher standard of living, but with “the continuous creation,

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never ending of a new way to be human” (32). Truth is earned by action, and action creates new realities. The hero’s creative will is not the same as the active, conscious will of ego. It shares nothing of the aggressive self-interest of “strong-willed” individualists. Though we prefer to think of ourselves as active, controlling our identities, the passive, unconscious function is broad and deep. Heroic choice, the creative act, flows from the deeper reaches. It is an orientation, a moving current, stronger than ego. It is like the love described in “The Song of Songs”: For love is strong as death, a passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. (8:6–7)

Caught up in that fire, “we undergo life as much as we undergo death” (Teilhard 48). Heroes love with all their strength and so build the new kingdom out of their own substance. William Faulkner’s story “The Bear” (1961, 185–316), describes the initiation of a hero, young Ike McCaslin. He and his mentor, Sam Fathers, half-Indian, half-black, are “priests of the wilderness,” at home in the forests ruled by Old Ben, the god-like bear. One day Ike’s little dog charges Ben and the boy risks his life, dropping his gun, plunging directly into the bear’s territory to save the dog. Ben, the “wild immortal spirit” rises above Ike, tremendous: All three are frozen in stasis for a long moment then, in a smooth, natural movement, Ike glides beneath the bear’s paws and pulls the dog from death to life. The mighty bear fades back into the wilderness. In facing death, Ike faces the most humanly significant and the most frightening aspect of the kinetic world. Nothing lasts. Temporality, “being toward death,” is a fundamental condition. Logos objectifies reality, reducing it to a stable but lifeless construction of permanent “things” (graven images). The reality of death is obscured and distanced. Ike smells the bear’s breath, he feels the unmediated presence of death. The boy enters the Kingdom when he risks his life. He does not cling to it but wills life back to its source. After this initiation rite, Ike asks his father to explain the meaning of the events. Mr. McCaslin replies: “Courage and honor and pride, and pity and the love of justice and of liberty. They all touch the heart, and what the heart holds to becomes truth, as far as we know the truth.” Coming alive to heart’s truth means accepting the paradox of personal mortality. Ike McCaslin eventually realizes that he has no place in the advancing world of commerce. He gives up his “cursed” inheritance and becomes a carpenter. In the Kingdom, Ike does not experience his loss of inheritance

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as poverty, or his alienation as loneliness. The initiatory process clears the mind as the burning coal cleanses the lips of the prophet. When washed clean of fear, poverty, loss, and pain lose their sharp edge and fall into a more bearable perspective. (As Satchel Paige once said, “It’s a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”) The Kingdom is generated by love, not power. It presents an alternative model, an axial change from the dominance structures typical of modern society. The Kingdom is not a power struggle, not a game with winners and losers; it is an art, an infinitely variable expressive movement, open to improvisation, based on love, not control. In the Kingdom, heroism breeds patience, not violence. Compassion is patient love. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians describes the hallmarks of charity: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor. 13:1) Prophetic powers, faith, even self-sacrifice matter nothing if not grounded in love. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful.

Love is utterly alien to the self-assertion of powerful egos. It is a grace, freely offered as part of a “gift economy,” among brothers and sisters, not something owed or won in a market economy. For the “wretched of the earth,” those exposed to generations of institutional violence, the gift of love, for others and for the self, must often be earned by sacrificial struggle. Franz Fanon describes the onset of the Kingdom among the powerless who join together for sacrificial struggle: Life is lived at an impossibly high temperature. There is a permanent outpouring in all the villages of spectacular generosity, of disarming kindness and willingness, which cannot ever be doubted, to die for the “Cause.” All this is evocative of a confraternity, a church, and a mystical body of belief at one and the same time. (133)

Violence is the inevitable outcome of untempered repression, but love, not power, fuels the emergence of this new brotherhood. It is born when people love each other, not when they hate the enemy. Jaron Lanier (2005) sees the progressive social and ecological movements, beginning with abolition and including civil rights, the antiwar movements, the extension of rights to women, gays, and animals, as evidence of an exponential role of expansion of the “circle of empathy” (Garreau 2005).

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[Love] does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Cor. 13)

The beatitudes follow from Charity: “Blessed are the meek” (Matt. 5); those who love others, without thought of competition or status, are happy. Those who offer recognition and dignity to outsiders earn their identities as daughters and sons of the King. “Blessed are the merciful”; those who forgive others rid themselves of the burden of their own anger. At the Judgment, all those who have compassion for others, will be welcomed. They feed the hungry and visit the sick, they offer themselves as the bread of life. The arrival of the Kingdom, no matter how partial, represents a turning point, a centripetal movement of consciousness toward love and away from the power-based individualism of the ego. It marks a move to the center, a return to the Garden, but not as a simple regression to tribal ways. Myth describes a spiral ascent to a restored innocence achieved by a conscious divestiture of personal power in favor of a new establishment of communal ties. The hero risks his safety, plunges into the unknown to save the people. The strong serve the weak and the last are put first. Love turns the other cheek because it is strong, not weak. Slave societies develop with Darwinian necessity; the strong and the clever, working in entrenched systems of reward and punishment, control power for their own purposes. Membership in the Kingdom is a simple gift, not defined by tribal affiliations, nor by adherence to cultic practices or verbal formulae. Its members are volunteers, bent on a mission. In the course of their lives, they generate a world of loving, mutual care. Like the heroes of the monomyth, the members act outside the parameters of reward and punishment. They are not preoccupied with saving their souls, but with the accomplishment of some urgent work. The holy ones, across all cultures, give themselves to the Kingdom by their acts of love. Like seeds, they surrender themselves to bring new life. If they are faithful to their archetypal roles, they will recognize their souls, the princess of myth, in the faces of the people they serve. Wisdom, God’s bride, is his revelation; to see her unveiled is a moment of supreme knowing, the marriage of God and the soul. In Walt Whitman’s words, the ultimate “rendezvous is appointed, it is certain, the Lord will be there” (Song of Myself. 1200). The heroes of the Kingdom, like their model, Jesus, are opposed by the status quo and treated as enemies. Premodern societies depict heroes as fighting external foes—monsters or foreign invaders. They offer love to their people and death to the enemy. Modern narrative, like the books of the prophets and the gospels, focuses on the enemy within—a social

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structure based on corruption and elitism. American literature often features small, subversive alliances, like Huck and Jim on the raft, Ishmael and Queequeg, Hawkeye and the Mohicans—outsiders, rogues, a battered brotherhood or communion of unlikely saints, traveling under the radar screens of established society. The Kingdom goes further. It represents a deeper interiorization of the struggle, requiring the hero to identify with the enemy, to love him, to recognize his own flaws in the light of the Other. The agon wears the hero down until all hubris, all pretension, is gone. In myth, the process is sometimes represented by the struggle between twins. When the last illusions fall away and the hero recognizes himself as human, “the son of man,” he is able to see his own face in that of his rival brother. He can then extend compassion to the brotherly enemy. The twins are reconciled, like Jacob and Esau, like Joseph and his brothers. In the Kingdom, paradoxically, to see oneself as the son of man is also to see oneself as the child of God. Finally, the Kingdom expands to include the body of the living universe. The Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, conceives of the Kingdom as a transition from deep-time to eternity. The cosmos, he says evolves through three critical stages. The first ends in the appearance of life, the biosphere. Inert minerals, gradually, over eons, come alive as myriad simple organic forms. Life develops from the simple to the complex, sustaining countless species as they come and go in a rising order of thought. Very gradually, mind, or the noosphere, develops, evolving from the most primitive levels of awareness, and culminating, for now, in the current formations of human consciousness. Ram Dass (1996), speaking from the Taoist tradition, describes a similar development of consciousness using the figure of an evolutionary clock. When the hands rest together at twelve o’clock, all is in balance. At 12:01, the garden disappears, ego rises, self-consciousness, the conflict between self and others, mars the harmony of original experience. What follows is a “continuous attempt to solidify, protect, and increase the power of our position as separate entities, to create security, gratification, power over the world around us” (1996, 732). After six, the hands of the clock begin to move very slowly back toward the original balance. “The pull of God is deeper and deeper. At that point, just before twelve o’clock on our evolutionary clock, the entire universe is with us and we experience all of the suffering that is connected with form on any plane of existence” (Dass 1996, 740). Dass describes the deepening “pull of God” as being like a fire, growing fiercer and hotter. At the moment, the hands of the clock meet, the doors open, innocence and unity are restored.

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Teilhard suggests that a similar swing back into balance is imminent. The “Omega Point,” a convergence of the human and divine, is to be accomplished by a centripetal movement of consciousness away from the divisive energy of ego and back to the center. The way to convergence is through loving others, diminishing individualism, embracing community. The Kingdom is both an early symptom of the convergence and a necessary catalyst. Its adoption of love rather than power as the matrix for society permits a crucial development in consciousness. In terms of deep-time, the long developmental ascent of life, the arrival of the Kingdom marks a quickening and a change in the vector or direction of development. In his late work, Karl Rahner,1 a Jesuit theologian, picks up Teilhard’s expectations of the transformation of the natural world at the Omega Point. Rahner speculates that the natural world, even the inorganic seas and mountains, will awaken and be a part of the glory, the divine manifestation. The Bible consistently speaks of nature as God related. He “rides on the wings of the wind,” (Ps. 104). He “made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting” (Ps. 104:19). In Psalm 118, the sun and the moon and the shining stars praise God. Praise the Lord from the earth You sea monsters and all deeps fire and hail, snow and frost . . . wild animals and all cattle Creeping things and flying birds!

Messianic prophecies envision a world animated by consciousness: “Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy” (Ps. 98:8). In Isaiah’s Messianic kingdom, the mountains and hills “shall burst into song, and all the trees of the fields shall clap their hands” (Is. 55:12). When Jesus enters Jerusalem just before his death the crowd begins to praise God loudly. The Pharisees ask Jesus to quiet the chant, but Jesus replies: “I tell you if these were silent, the stones themselves would shout out.” These biblical images of extended, unitary consciousness fall outside the pale of mainstream theology but are a relatively common theme in mystical literature and poetry. Karl Rahner’s late essays on the theology of symbol and on poetry move strongly in the direction of mythos. “The whole of theology is incomprehensible if it is not essentially a theology of symbols” (Rahner 1975, 235). Religious thought must become “the hymn-like discussion of God” (Rahner 1964, 25). Rahner distinguishes between words used as univocal signs in rational discourse, and what he

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calls the Uhrworte, the “great words,” the archetypal symbols: “Blossom, Night, Star and Day, Root and Font, Wind and Laughter, Rose, Blood and Earth, Boy, Smoke, Word, Kiss, Lightening, Breath, Quiet” (Rahner 1964, 6). The Ur-words are like gates opening on a new reality. They are “the children of God who possess something of the brilliant darkness of their Father” (Rahner 1964, 6). The oak tree is the full physical manifestation of the acorn as our bodies and our lives manifest our souls. The organizing principle, the genotype, is actualized in the living form, coming to full realization in the patterns of our lives. So, Rahner says, the cosmos is God’s symbol, his dance, his body. “God lavishly squanders himself” in the universe, the “ultimate self revelation . . . the ultimate eschatological truth” (Rahner 1964, 20). All of reality is in motion. In the revelatory moment, the movement is recognized as gesture. At our current level of consciousness, we recognize that the arts bear meaning. Music is not noise; dance is not merely a form of locomotion. In the awakened world, all being is meaning. Now we merely measure change; then we will interpret the movement of the universe as if it were dance or poetry. The world of “things” will rise to the level of symbol. When humanity learned to speak, we named things, adding meaning, an invisible, intangible layer of reality to the things themselves. Adam called the animals by name, and they became an intelligible part of human experience, real in a new way. At the Omega Point, things will name themselves, entering the chorus, saying, “I am.” The burning bush Moses saw on Mt. Sinai was the universe, all being, aflame with love. Later, after God’s glory passes by Moses, his face burns with the reflection of the fire, and he must cover his face with a veil to spare the people. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says, “Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire.” He imagines the extension of this apocalyptic love to the universe: Throughout my life, through my life, the world has little by little caught fire in my sight until, aflame all around me, it has become almost completely luminous from within . . . the divine at the heart of the universe on fire. (Divine Milieu 14)

Rahner turns to the poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke to illustrate these matters and the theology of symbols. In “The Ninth Duino Elegy,” Rilke describes the physical universe:

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. . . Everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. (Rilke, 10–13)

“All realities,” says Rahner, “long to be unveiled. They wish to enter into the light of knowledge and love if not as knowers, then at least as knowns” (1964, 9). Things wish to “come to word.” The first human word was mythos, the ancient complex of symbols underlying all our poetry and storytelling. The word Rahner describes is a product of simplicity and purity of heart springing from heroic detachment. It is the Pentecostal word of the not-yet-realized Kingdom. In “The Ninth Duino Elegy,” Rilke sees the human role as lending meaning to all things: Perhaps we are here in order to say house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window— at most: column, tower . . . but to say them, you must understand, oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing.

In this ultimate moment of knowing, everything may finally “shudder with joy,” the apocalyptic joy of the bride and groom. In Rahner’s words, the poet saves “things” from “the dumbness of their reference to God” (1964, 10). Objects “become more themselves,” they acquire an “intimacy of being when they are known” (Rahner 1964, 8). In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke compares human mediation to bees producing honey: “As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him” (1984, 62). Our task is to impress this preliminary, transient earth upon ourselves with so much suffering and so passionately that its nature rises up again “invisible” within us. We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up in the great golden beehive of the Invisible. (Briefes aus Muzot, 335, November 13, 1925 in Rilke 1984, 130)

Rilke speaks of God as “the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.” He tells the suffering poet that perhaps the one who is coming “needs this very anguish of yours in order to begin; these very days of your transition are perhaps the times when everything in you is working at Him, as you once worked at Him in your childhood, breathlessly” (61–63). Rahner says “from all this objective reality, there will be gathered

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up into the eternal barns of God only that which has gone into living hearts” (Rahner 1964, 19). Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is a similar hymn to the physical world—the river, the seabirds, ships, and smoky foundries. They are what they do—flags fly, fires burn. In the Kingdom, all that they do reveals their affinity with the sacred. The concrete world of appearances indicates what things are, “You necessary film,” the poet says, “continue to envelop the soul. / About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas.” The bodily world wants to be recognized: “You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers. / We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate hence forward.” When we see nature as it is, without reference to our power over it, reality emerges with fiery immediacy. Whitman says we need not pretend to understand the body of the world; instead, say to nature: We love you—there is perfection in you also, You furnish your parts toward eternity, Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul. (120–132)

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ternity is not “a long, long time.” Boethius defines eternity as “the simultaneous possession, altogether, of endless life.” It is a perpetual Now, the still point of past and future. At our present level of consciousness, experiencing all life and meaning at once would be like hearing all the notes of a symphony at the same instant. Time, a measure of change, is the human milieu. Knowing comes to us successively, in time, and is lost to time as our memories waver and fade. In the traditional understanding of heaven and hell as places, nothing is ever lost; eternity is changeless duration. The harps and haloes of heaven represent a settled order. Entropy is overcome, and nothing ever fades or alters. Eternity as endless time is an elusive meta-concept, attractive in that it seems to promise permanency to the ego; it is also somehow horrifying when seen as a permanent, fixed condition. Certainly that is evident in the images of hell as an eternal pit of flame. In James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (151–52), a sermon on hell-fire describes eternity using the image of a bird endlessly circling a mountain of fine sand. Once in a million years she touches down and carries away a grain of sand in her beak. “Eons upon eons” will pass before the bird carries all away. “Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time, not even one instant of eternity” will have passed. Classical mythology hints at the same dread of endless existence. The Sibyl of Cumae, for instance, is so beautiful that Apollo offers her anything she wishes. She chooses eternal life. Petronius describes her sad fate. The Sibyl neglects to ask for eternal youth, and she withers away until she is a little creature of skin and bones. She hangs in a cage in the town square, a victim of endless time. When mocking children ask her what she wants, she no longer asks for life. She says, “I want to die.” Tithonus, a Trojan

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prince, was loved by the goddess of the dawn, and like the Sibyl, was given eternal life, but not eternal youth. In Tennyson’s poem, “Tithonus,” the changeless splendor of the rising sun is in sad contrast with the old man, a “white-haired shadow,” withering slowly in the arms of Aurora. He prays for relief from life and time—a return to “those dim fields about the homes / Of happy men that have the power to die.” Eternity, heaven and hell, stand outside of time. Time is a human imposition on the flux of experience. We improvise calendars and clocks to bring the current of change into a manageable frame, but reality moves in vastly different tempos and rhythms. Some particles flash through existence in nanoseconds. The tectonic plates move even more slowly than the glaciers. We cannot perceive change, or measure it intelligibly, at the extremes of the spectrum of time. We think nothing has moved until the earthquake reveals the tectonic shift. Many moderns, like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and T. S. Eliot, have focused on time as a category of perception. I would like to adapt some of Northrop Frye’s insights (1990, 179) to suggest four figurations of time, four ways of interpreting it. In the Garden, time is a slow rhythm. The diurnal cycle is more like a pulse beat than a metronome. It quickens and slows as the sun rises and sets at different times, making long days and short days. The seasons run smoothly and generations follow each other along the primal paths. Garden time is as slow and as exuberant as a childhood summer. Clock time is a modern paradigm, a constellation of identical seconds and minutes organizing work time. Mechanical time orders duration in terms of use and control. The twisted clocks in Salvador Dali’s paintings reflect the pain of enforced conformity. Typically, clock time envisions three sorts of time, past, present, and future, where the present is only a way station toward some desirable future. At its worst, it reflects the terrible dread of mortality, the darkening close to time. Frye calls this “demonic time . . . pure duration and the power of annihilation” (1990, 179). In accepting clock time as real time, modern consciousness hangs crucified on the hands of a clock. In Faulkner’s words, we are “worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels” (The Sound and the Fury, pt. 2). Frye’s third configuration of time is associated with musical forms. It is Sabbath time, Kingdom time. Without the distractions of fear and desire, life falls into easy patterns comparable to the rhythms of music. The present moment comes to consciousness as part of a harmonious, unfolding pattern. The listener experiences a familiar piece of music successively, hearing each note as it sounds, while anticipating the later notes. The last notes are implicit in its first notes. Though listening in time, the hearer

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enjoys a proleptic experience of the piece in its fullness. The same can be said of reading a familiar tale or watching a favorite film. The words and images, though experienced in sequence, are part of a meaningful pattern, entirely present to us, and more than the sum of the parts. A life lived in Sabbath time contains its share of pain, but the suffering is bearable because it is meaningful, accepted as part of the human archetype. Eternity, the fourth configuration of time, is changeless and still; yet, it is the sum of all activity. God is action and being, as his scriptural name, “I am who I Am,” indicates. His time is a perpetual Now. What Boethius calls eternal life, the full web of meaning, is present to Him always. On his deathbed, John Donne spoke of himself as “God’s music.” “Hymn to My God My God, in My Sickness” (241) describes Donne sailing through the narrow straits of fever to join the choir of saints. In eternity, Donne will become the music—transparent, fully present to God from start to finish. All opposites, past and future, life and death meet in a moment. Donne says he is like a map, stretched on his bed, showing the way home. As West and East touch each other at the opposite edges of flat maps, “So death doth touch the resurrection.” In the divine Now, Donne’s lifetime is compressed to a still point, pulled into the larger harmony, fully experienced for the first time—a soul, a seed, the alpha and omega of all his meaning. Sometimes it is possible to experience God’s time, at least in a preliminary way. Walt Whitman describes this perpetual moment: I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now. And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. (“Song of Myself,” 3.38–44, 22)

Past and future touch, like live wires, and the spark is Now. Thoreau notes that people think that absolute truth is remote: “In the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam, after the last man.” But all these times and places “are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages” (Walden, ch. 2, 101). As Faulkner observed, there is a sense in which the past is not gone: “It is not even past.” Effects linger on. Embryos pass through stages in the womb that roughly parallel evolutionary development—gill slits, hairy

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bodies, tails—all outgrown and archaic, but recapitulated as part of the developmental process. In terms of personal formation, some experiences are repressed, not remembered, but not entirely forgotten. In Freud’s words, “Nothing is trivial.” Once a pattern is encoded into a relational system, it somehow remains present in the system. If a thing is actualized, made real, rather than merely possible, it remains imprinted in reality. Seth Lloyd’s Programming the Universe describes the cosmos as an enormous computer. Every physical event feeds information in, and the cosmic computer arrays it as “reality.” Once in the memory nothing can be erased or lost. In the Afterword, Lloyd describes the death of a respected colleague and finds solace: “We have not entirely lost him. While he lived [he] programmed his own piece of the universe. The resulting computation unfolds in and around us.” In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” (143) Walt Whitman uses the metaphor of the current in the river to describe the thread binding past and future. The poet is caught in the current rushing so swiftly through time and space. But “It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not. / I am with you, you men and women of a generation or ever so many generations hence” (3, 1–2). He sees us “face to face” because he is real, actualized: “I too lived.” He was “struck from the float . . . I too received identity by my body” (5, 7–8). He passed from the merely potential to the actual; the genetic cards were shuffled and out of all that entropy, all the billions of possible genetic outcomes, Walt Whitman emerged. The event that is Whitman fed information into the system. He is an activity, “I am a dance,” he says, “Play up there!” (Sleepers, 388, l.33). His movements are sustained by “all things at all hours of the day. The simple, compact, welljoin’d scheme.” Being sustains itself in a perpetual, orderly interaction. What becomes real remains real; as Whitman reaches across the years to touch his readers, his words are a living force, changing his readers’ perceptions. “Who knows,” he asks, “but I am enjoying this? / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?” (Brooklyn Ferry 7, l. 6–7). In eternity, all meaning is perpetually present. Heaven is an activity, a recognition, and a full response to the divine reality. The great mystics of the world describe it as ecstatic love, the apocalyptic embrace of the divine groom and his bride, all of creation. “God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him” (1 John 4:16). The act of divine love occurs “all the time,” in the perpetual Now. The Father loves the Son of Man now and forever, “before the foundation of the world.”

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As you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us, so the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one as we are one. (John 17:21–22)

The Christ, manifested universally in the archetypal forms, binds the times together. “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:59). “I am the root and the descendent of David, the bright morning star” (Rev. 22–16). All times and all people are present to God. “I am the alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, the one who is and who was and who is to come” (Rev. 1:8). God lives and dies with the microscopic organisms in the sea, passing birth and death in moments. He notes the fall of every sparrow and endures the long cycles of countless galaxies. The life of the eternal vine is in the whole; it is process and interaction, a sequence in which we play an intrinsic role, even though we discern neither the process nor our place in it. At the Last supper, Jesus prays, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus the Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3–50). To recognize and reflect God’s glory in human terms, the heroic paradigm, is to share in the divine life. Jesus asks the Sadducees if they remember God’s words to Moses: “‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.’ He is God not of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:26–72). All people are alive to God. Eternity pulls all life into a single point; it becomes smaller and smaller until we can finally see it. If a life were a tapestry woven one thread every day, we would travel across the loom, blindly, seeing only today’s thread. In eternity, we step back and see the whole exquisite pattern. God stands outside time, seeing the entire tapestry of life in its full presence. And at last we see God’s face; Paul says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). In the Paradiso, Dante first sees heaven as a river of light, flowing through a garden. As his eyes become accustomed to the radiance, the mystical rose emerges, tiers of petals, each a blessed soul, quiring to the sun, as myriads of angels hover like bees over the flower, their faces aflame. The musical movement of love in the Paradiso ends with the evocation of a smoothly circling cosmic wheel, the love that moves the sun and all the stars (542). In human experience, that same flowing energy shows itself in the kindness and endurance typifying the Kingdom. In the beatific vision, that love becomes a fiery passion like the burning bush, ablaze, but changeless, not consumed. The object of this love is the totality of everything that is or was, or will be—the seed, the vine, leaves, blossoms, the

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fruit of life, the scent of it, the intoxicating taste of “the old wine of Heaven.” John Keats described the final convergence of everything good, true and beautiful. The “old wine of Heaven,” he said, is the savor of our best moments of happiness repeated in a finer tone—an old melody heard again with a new, breath-taking intensity (“To Benjamin Bailey,” 1817; Keats 887). Hell, too, is an activity. In the extrinsic view of hell, God heaps fire on the damned because it is exactly what they deserve. The preacher in Portrait of the Artist observes that the “holiness of heaven” demands a hell. “God would not be God if he did not punish transgressions.” Hell is an essential component in a moral system based on reward and punishment. From a more intrinsic standpoint, where sinners are punished by their sins, not for them, hell is something we insist on doing to ourselves. The tension between the imperative to love God and the habit of turning away from love, clinging to the ego, to one’s own smallness, causes an agonizing split in the souls of the damned. Dante’s Inferno uses metaphors of motion to describe heaven and hell as activities. If reality is act, if people are what they do, if the purest act is love, then the stubborn stillness of hell, the refusal to love, represents a final collapse into the void of non-being. In the last circle of hell (Canto XXXIV), Satan crouches, half-submerged in ice, surrounded by frozen spirits, unmoving, coated in frost. The fiend’s webbed wings stir very slightly and his teeth tear the bodies of the damned in a slow, perpetual grinding motion. His devouring rage at Judas and the other traitors he consumes represents Satan’s self-loathing. He hates Judas as he hates himself, with endless impotent malice. Satan retains just enough motion to enact his identity, to sustain his minimal reality. Hans Kung begins Eternal Life? (1984) with a quote from Max Frisch’s play, Triptych (1981): “The dead never learn.” The main character rocks in her chair, changeless. “Nothing has happened that hasn’t happened before . . . We’re going round in circles . . . I want to sleep . . . I want never to have lived at all” (1984, 3). In No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre, too, suggests that isolation with others as narcissistic and egotistical as oneself constitutes infernal suffering—self-inflicted boredom in a hall of reflecting mirrors. “Hell is other people.” Milton’s Satan cannot escape self-wrought despair, “Which way I fly is Hell, Myself am Hell” (14:74–75). In one of his dark sonnets, Gerard Manley Hopkins imagines the bitterness of Hell: “My taste was me.” The damned, he says, “are like this, and their scourge is to be / As I am mine, their sweating selves but worse” (Hopkins, “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark” 891).

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Perhaps it is ultimately futile to pursue absolute ideas of soul and eternity. Our questions about eternity are nonsense. “How many hours are there in a circle? Is yellow square or round?” (C.S. Lewis, 588). Yet it seems possible, sometimes, to see a little way around the corners of space and time. Northrop Frye speculates on human life as communal, tracing a historical pattern of return, like the hero’s spiral path from the Garden to the New Jerusalem. In infancy, the baby does not distinguish clearly between itself and the “outside” world. Subject and object swim in an undifferentiated flow of sense experience because ego has not yet emerged to insist on its separate identity. In eternity, he suggests, “all of being” may hold together in identity. It will be “a world in which there is only one knower, for there is nothing outside of, or objective to that knower, hence nothing dead or insensible” (Frye 1982, 166). Carl Jung, too, reports on intimations of this shared life. In 1944, after a heart attack, Jung drifted for weeks in and out of an ecstatic state. “I felt as though I were floating in space, as though I were safe in the womb of the universe.” He dreams that he is in the glorious New Jerusalem. “There were ineffable states of joy. Angels were present, and light. I myself was the ‘Marriage of the Lamb’” (1989, 294). The dreamer becomes the act of love. In mystical traditions across history, the boundaries between God and the soul are porous and shifting. The Upanishads say the “Unreachable” is yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat. C. S. Lewis describes his frustrated efforts to question God about the last things: “And more than once, that impression which I can’t describe except by saying that it’s like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the right answer” (cited in Vardey 1996, 589). God is always Now, but human capacities for perception require time; things must occur in sequence for us to assimilate them. Our memories are short and partial. The opening notes of the music slide away as we move beyond them. Our memories retain impressions of everything we have ever known, but we cannot access this knowing except in disordered dreams and unbidden Proustian recollections of childhood. Emerson, struggling in “The American Scholar” (52–53) to articulate the passage from time to eternity, speaks of the evolution of memory. Events of early childhood, often unremarkable, recur spontaneously, as vivid, riddling images, powerful but enigmatic. He mentions “the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries” Over time, these small, unexceptional things assume archetypal intensity. Emerson says that eventually all the events of our private histories will “soar and sing,”lose their inert forms and take on the endless life of the archetypal forms. They will

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“detach [themselves] from life like a ripe fruit . . . They are raised, transfigured.” Then our memories will be God’s memory. In our dreams, we sometimes see our lost mothers and fathers again, but only imperfectly and in passing. God’s memory is the antitype, the perfection, of our own clouded hold on time. It spans past and present, holding everything in the brilliant light of his knowing. Nothing is lost. Washed clean by the light, “mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

NOTES I NTRODUCTION 1. For other cognitive science studies of language, see Pinker (1997, 2002). See also Lakoff and Turner (1989). 2. See also my New Jerusalem: Myth, Literature, and the Sacred, a study of mythic elements in American literature (Scranton University Press, 2000).

C HAPTER 1 1. Until this point, Genesis is written in prose, but the creation of humankind is announced in a burst of poetry. Often the most important sections of scripture are written in verse. The lines of Hebrew poetry are shorter than the pentameter to which English speakers are accustomed. Often the lines contain three accented syllables and are joined together in units of two, in which the second line restates or amplifies the image of the first line: So God created human kind in his image, In the image of God he created them. (Gen. 1:27) Praise God, all nations Exalt Him, all peoples. (Ps. 117:1) Sometimes instead of being synonymous, the parallels are antithetical: A wise child makes a glad father, A foolish child is a mother’s grief. (Prov. 10:1) Although Hebrew verse does not rhyme, it makes use of assonance, repeated vowel sounds and consonants internal to the lines. These, of course, are lost in translation. Like all poetry, biblical verse provides structures of rhythmic sounds, based on repetitions, echoes, parallels, that emphasize the unitary nature of the poem. 2. Chapter 2 of Genesis actually begins with verse 4 of the Chapter 2 in modern Bibles. When the scriptures were divided into chapters and verses the editor erred in separating the first four verses of P’s account and placing them in Chapter 2. 3. The editors of the HarperCollins Study Bible (Meeks 1993) point to chiasmus, a literary device operating to unify the story of Adam and Eve

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N OTES (Gen. 2:44–4:1).Chiasmus is relatively common in the bible, but almost unknown in modern literature. The name is “derived from the Greek term for the letter X, or a cross-over.” It describes “a sequence of two phrases or clauses which are parallel in syntax, but reverse the order of the corresponding words” (Abrams 1988, 161–62). Biblical chiasmus goes further, arranging images or events in parallel form focusing on a central image or event. In the Garden story, Chapters 2 to 4, the HarperCollins editors detect an orderly build-up to the central episode, the transgression, followed by a symmetrical recession (Meeks 1993, 4). Verse 2:4 begins “These are the generations . . . ” and in 4:1, the concluding verse, the “birth of a child completes one generation.” In 2:7–17 humans begin life in the garden and in the parallel verses (3:22–24) they are denied immortality and expelled from Eden (Joel Rosenberg, Harper Collins Study Bible, 4). The Genesis account of the fall is far from being a simple sequential narrative designed merely to convey information. The symmetrical arrangement of chiasmus is a formal element, arranged to convey meaning, to highlight the central significance of the events described.

C HAPTER 2 1. See Neumann (1963, 220–61) for a study of Osiris as fertility god and transformative hero. 2. Ryan and Pitman (1999) introduces evidence that the basin of the Black Sea was the home of many small agricultural communities at the end of the last Ice Age. Some of the inhabitants may have escaped widespread flooding to tell their stories all along the Mediterranean basin. However, there is no evidence of a worldwide flood and no reason to believe that the story of even such a cataclysm as the Black Sea flood would persist for 5,000 years in Middle Eastern legend. The ubiquity of the story suggests that it is based in archetypal rather than historical experience. 3. See Ronald S. Hendel’s article (1992) on the various interpretations of the phrase “sons of God.” He points out that early rabbinic and Christian readings sought to dilute the polytheistic implications by interpreting “sons of god” to mean, respectively, righteous men and the descendants of Seth. Sometimes it was translated “sons of Israel,” but Hendel points out that a recently found fragment among the Dead Sea Scrolls corroborates his view that the original phrase was “sons of God,” a phrase related to early Israelite polytheism. 4. The Semites are descended from “Shem,” meaning “name” or “identity.” God is sometimes referred to as Hashem, the Name. 5. “Manabozho,” the Algonquin legend, translated by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, is available in Schoolcraft’s Indian Legends, Mentor Williams, ed., Michigan State UniversityPress, 1956, pp 65–83. Manabozho appears, with slightly different names and exploits, in tales from a number of related Native American

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tribes. My book New Jerusalem: Myth, Literature, and the Sacred contains a chapter on “Manabozho.”

C HAPTER 3 1. The episode is usually seen as a condemnation of homosexuality, which it is, but it must also be seen in the larger context of the biblical critique of cities. The men in the story act violently, attempting to violate the angels as well as Lot’s daughters. Ezekiel notes (16:48) that the sin of Sodom was “pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, [They] did not aid the poor and needy.” 2. By some readings, Ishmael would be thirteen at this time but is presented here as a babe in arms. 3. Gina Maranto’s study notes, “By around seven thousand years ago, with the rise of the earliest cities, infanticide appears to have been practiced by all extant groups of people, and in some instances may have been ceremonially elevated, taking its place alongside other forms of live sacrifice” (1996, 17). Scholars speculate that early Israel may, like the neighboring Canaanite tribes, have practiced child sacrifice, but there is no hard evidence on this. The only sacrifice reported in the Bible is in the Book of Judges, where Jepthah offers to sacrifice the first creature he sees if he returns home victorious. Like Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, Jepthah’s offering is rejected and brings tragic consequences. Ezekiel seems to indicate that at one time Israel had practiced child sacrifice because God had given “laws that were not good.” Jeremiah vehemently denies that Jahweh ever asked or tolerated child sacrifice (Jer. 19:5–6). See also Jon D. Levenson (1993) on child sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. 4. Seeking grain in Egypt is an early theme in Genesis, appearing in three strange episodes involving the patriarchs and their wives (Gen. 12:19, 20:2, and 26:8). In the first, Abram goes to Egypt for grain but passes off the beauteous Sarai as his sister rather than his wife. He says he is afraid Pharaoh will kill him to possess Sarai. Pharaoh takes her into his harem and gives Abram many flocks and slaves. The Lord afflicts Pharaoh with plagues; he recognizes his error and sends Abram and Sarai on their way with great wealth. Gen. 20:2 retells the story; only Pharaoh is replaced by a Canaanite king named Abimelech, and Sarah, ninety by now, is taken into the harem, but the Lord intervenes before Abimelech approaches her. Again, the ruler realizes his mistake and rewards Abraham. In Gen. 26:8, Isaac gives Rachel to Abimelech with a similar outcome. If read literally, this strange triplet certainly puts the patriarchs in a bad light. Most scholars agree that the stories are versions of the same source, intended to foreshadow the events of Genesis and Exodus, when the Israelites go to Egypt, are enslaved, and then released with wealth. 5. Israel adopts Joseph’s two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, and on his deathbed mistakenly gives the blessing of the firstborn to Ephraim. The tribe of Ephraim dominated the Northern kingdom and was the last surviving tribe

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C HAPTER 4 1. Even a cursory study of world myth concerning the endangered child reveals a wealth of analogues. In the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Set, the evil twin confines Osiris in a coffin and throws him into the Nile. Perseus and his mother are locked in a box and flung into the sea. The Queen of Tagaung, in Burma, sixth century BCE, gives birth to blind twin boys. The father orders them killed, but she hides them and eventually sends them off down the river on a raft. An ogress threatens them, but the twins defeat her. In return for her life, she cures their blindness, and they establish a dynasty. The child-in-theark motif is akin to the hero swallowed and confined in the belly of the whale and to all the many variations of the royal child abandoned and raised by a rescuer (Oedipus, Arthur, Sayatha of the Mandinka people, Chandragupta, a Hindu prince, Huck Finn, Luke Skywalker, etc.). Parallels between the story of Moses and other patriarchal figures are also clear. Ronald Hendel (1987) notes the similarities between Moses and Jacob: special birth, youthful subversive/illicit behavior, encounter with God, initial resistance, promises, the wife at the well, wrestling with God, rewards, and so on. Parallels to the New Testament story of Jesus are also evident (see Kinsky 1993). 2. For other examples of love as fire that does not consume, see Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Dan. 3:13–30), three heroic youths thrown into a fiery furnace as martyrs. They emerge from the flames unscathed. In medieval imagery Mary is likened to the Burning Bush because her love allowed her to conceive and bear the holy child while remaining intact as a virgin (see Chaucer, “Prioress’ Prologue”). See also Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” and nineteenth-century iconography of the Sacred Heart. 3. See Harris (2000, 120–21) for a summary review of the various biblical names for God. Biblical editor J says that the name “Jahweh” was used from the time of Adam’s grandchildren (Gen. 4:26). E and P indicate that its first usage was in the revelation to Moses (Exod. 3:13–15, 6:2–4). When God appears in the burning bush he describes himself as the Elohim of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Elohim, the plural of El, is a generic term for God widely used among Semitic tribes. El is often linked with a descriptive term, such as El Shaddai, God of the High Places, (traditionally translated God Almighty) (Gen. 28:3) or El Roi, God who sees (Gen. 16:15). In Exod. 6:1–8, P’s version, God says, “I am Yahweh. To Abraham and Isaac and Jacob I appeared as El Shaddai. I did not make myself known to them by my name Yahweh . . . ” In the NRSV translation, Jahweh is rendered in English as “the LORD,” in capital letters. The term “Adonai” is frequently substituted for Jahweh in prayers.

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4. Rainer Marie Rilke, untitled “improvised verse” (in Heidegger 1946, 99), “The Force of Gravity” (Heidegger, 1946 104), and “Sonnets to Orpheus” (II, 28).

C HAPTER 5 1. Jeremiah and Ezekial experience similar calls. The Lord touches Jeremiah’s lips and puts his words in the prophet’s mouth. Ezekial is given a scroll to swallow and he assimilates the word, merging with his message. 2. The Suffering Servant is also described in Is. 42:1–10, 49:1–6, 50:4–11, 52:14–15, 53:1–14.

C HAPTER 6 1. Job’s personal name, attested in various texts from the second millennium BCE, means, etymologically, “Where is my Father?” (Oxford Study Bible, 1992, note, 510). It may also mean “inveterate foe,” or “the penitent one.” 2. The trial texts are scattered through chapters 19 to 31, as the comforters continue to argue and are joined by another speaker, Elihu, who repeats and embellishes the comforters. 3. For more on go-el, see Lev. 25:25, Deut. 25:5, Ruth 2:20. The go-el was often a family member who would defend or ransom the accused. 4. See references to Leviathan in Ps. 5; Ps. 74:9, 12, and 89; and Is. 27:1.

C HAPTER 7 1. See Reuther (1974) and Breidenthal (1999). 2. In Luke’s account, the woman is not named. Two verses after the story of the sinner, Mary Magdalene is described as being among a group of women traveling with Jesus and the disciples. Luke says seven demons had been driven out of Mary. She is later described as being present at the crucifixion and as seeing the risen Christ. Matthew’s account (26:6) of the woman anointing the feet of Jesus does not mention her name nor does Mark’s narrative (14:3). These versions place the episode in Bethany, at the home of Simon the Leper, very shortly before Jesus’ death. Onlookers rebuke the woman for wasting the expensive ointment that could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus replies, “The poor you have always with you, but you will not always have me. By pouring this ointment on me she has prepared me for burial” (Matt. 26:6). He associates his role as Messiah, the anointed one, with his burial. John’s account (12:1) identifies the woman as Mary, the sister of Lazarus, who lived in Bethany, not Magdala.

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C HAPTER 10 1. See also Mark McVann’s study (1988) of Mark’s passion narrative as initiation ritual.

C HAPTER 11 1. One hundred and fifty-three is a symbolic number indicating great plenty. It is arrived at by multiplying each integer, one, five, and three, by itself two times (5 ǂ 5 ǂ 5 = 125), then adding the sums together (1 + 125 + 27 = 153). The many fish have reference to the plentiful harvest of souls.

C HAPTER 12 1. The John who wrote the epistles is not the evangelist nor the writer of Revelations. Scholars believe him to be an elder of the Johannine community, writing to defend against Gnostic readings of scripture. 2. David Fideler. 1993. “Magic Square of the Sun” in Jesus Christ, Sun of God: Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books), 11.

The 6 ǂ 6 magic square of the sun contains the first thirty-six numbers arranged in such a fashion so that each line of numbers, whether added horizontally, vertically, or diagonally from corner to corner, will yield the “solar number” 111. The entire magic square therefore equals 666, a number that was significant to early Christian mystics. In Hebrew Kabbalah, the names of the Intelligence of the Sun and the Spirit of the Sun were designed to equal 111 and 666 respectively. Like 888, 666 is an important musical number, for .666 is the ratio of the perfect fifth, the most powerful harmonic interval. Reprinted by permission of Quest Books, the imprint of The Theosophical Publishing House, http://www.questbooks.net.

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C HAPTER 13 1. See Rahner “Priest and Poet” (1964) and “The Theology of the Symbol” (1975). See also my “Dancing Sophia: Rahner’s Theology of Symbols” (1993).

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———. 2000b.Vision of the Last Judgment. In Abrams, 86–87 Boethius. 1969.The Consolations of Philosophy. V.E.Watts, Trans. Baltimore: Penguin. Bohm, David. 1986. The Implicate Order: A New Approach to the Nature of Reality. In Schindler 1986, 13–37. Borg, Marcus J. 2003. The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith. San Francisco: Harper. Breidenthal, Thomas. 1999. Neighbor-Christology: Reconstructing Christianity before Supersessionism. CrossCurrents 49 (3): 319–48. Bruner, Jerome S. 1968. Myth and Identity. In Murray 1968, 252–305. Bruns, Gerald L. 1987. Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation. In Alter and Kermode 1987, 625–45. Bruteau, Beatrice. 1996. Radical Optimism: Rooting Ourselves in Reality. New York: Crossroad. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. 1993. Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twentieth Century. New York: Scribner. Buber, Martin. 1956. The Master of Prayer. In The Tales of Rabbi Nachman. Retold by Martin Buber. New York: Horizon Press. Bultmann, Rudolf. 2004. “The New Testament and Mythology: The Mythological Element in the Message of the New Testament and the Problem of its Reinterpretation.” In Evans 2004, 323–59. Burke, Kenneth. 1937. Attitudes Toward History. New York: New Republic Burkert, Walter. 1979. Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1996. Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen Series XVII. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Originally published 1949.) Cesaire, Aime. 1969. Return to my Native Land. John Berger, Anna Bostock, trans. Baltimore: Penguin Books. Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1987. The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. The Riverside Chaucer.Larry D. Benson et al eds. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 3rd ed. Clasby, Nancy Tenfelde. 1988. Malcolm X and Liberation Theology. Cross Currents.173–83 ———. 1993. Dancing Sophia: Rahner’s Theology of Symbols. Religion and Literature 25 (1): 51–65. ———. 2000. New Jerusalem: Myth, Literature and the Sacred. Scranton, PA: Scranton University Press. Coogan, Michael, ed. 2001. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. 3rd ed. Oxford University Press. [This study uses the NRSV unless otherwise noted.] Crossan, John Dominic. 1980. Felix Culpa and Foenix Culprit. Semeia 18. Crusemann, Frank. 1996. The Torah: Theology and Social History of Old Testament Law. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

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INDEX

Abbot, Edwin, 200 Abraham, 51 Abrams, M. H., 26, 126, 234, 246, 250 agent detection, 16 Akedah, 54, 58 Alter, Robert, 125 Am Haretz, 135 Anima figure, 11, 34, 131, 209, 218. See Sophia anthropomorphism, xi, 53, 139, 146 Antichrist, 205, 207 Apocalypse, 202–11 archetypes, x, 6, 23, 215 Ark of the covenant, 90 Armageddon, 206 Armstrong, Karen, xi, 19, 55, 215 Assman, John, 77, 89 Arthurian legend, 85 Athena, 20 Atrahasis, 44, 47 Atran, Scott, 15–17 Atun, 19 Auerbach, Erich, 58, 103 Augustine of Hippo, 2, 60 Axial Age, xi, 215 Babel, 49 Batto, Bernard, 86 beatitudes, 163, 218 Behemoth, 126 Berlinerblau, Jacques, 60 Bhagavad Ghita, 126 Big Bang, 21–22 Black Elk, 190–91 Blake, William, 24, 32, 116

Boethius, 225 Bohm, David, 215 Borg, Marcus, 91, 163, 168, 171 bread, 149, 168, 178 Breidenthall, Thomas, 237 Bruner, Jerome, 3 Bruteau, Beatrice, 51, 172, 176, 178 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 128 Buber, Martin, 20, 106, 117 Bultmann, Rudolf, 133 Burke, Kenneth, 74 Burkert, Walter, 13–14, 22 burning bush, 79, 222 Cain and Abel, 41 Campbell, Joseph, 8, 9, 43, 94, 103, 133, 139, 189 Cesaire, Aime, 177 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 236 chiasmus, 60, 233 children, 164 Christian, David, 1 cognitive sciences, 6 Coogan, Michael, 3, 78, 87 creation myths, 19 ff cross symbolism, 189, 191 Crossan, John, 39 crucifixion, 183 Crusemann, Frank, 88 Dabru Emet, 135 Damasio, Antonio, 6–7 Damon, Foster, 131 Dante, Alighieri, 229–30 Dardel, Eric, 18 Dass, Ram, 219

252 David, 98 Dawkins, Richard, 22 death-rebirth imagery, xi, 10, 59, 68, 70, 84–86, 101, 128–32, 142–43, 155, 157, 171–72, 174–75, 189, 189, 200–201, 214 Demytholgogizing, Bultmann, 133 Derrida, Jacques, 49–50 Dicken, Thomas, 8 Dickinson, Emily, 18 Dillard, Annie, 95 documentary hypothesis, 31–32, 43 Dodd, C. H., 2, 150 Donne, John, 227 Doran, Robert, 2 Douglas, Mary, 60 dragons, 35, 87, 127, 206, 214 Dundes, Alan, 18 Eakin, Emily, 1 Ecclesiastes, 118 Edinger, Edward, 23, 63, 69–70, 79, 90, 94, 132 Eliade, Mircea, 8, 87 Eliot, T. S., 11, 116 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 58, 93, 172, 231 endangered child, 79, 236 Enuma Elish, 19, 54, 90 Essenes, 135 eternity, 225–31 Ezekial, 190 faith, 148, 215 Fanon, Frantz, 177, 217 Faulkner, William, 216, 226 Fideler, David, 137, 208, 238 firstborn son, 82–83 Fish, Stanley, ix flood narratives, 4, 43–45, 78 fortunate fall, 37–38 Frazer, James, 8 Fromm, Erich, 89, 156 Frye, Northrop, 8–9, 49, 133, 148, 226, 231

I NDEX Frymer-Kensky, Tivka, 135 garden, ix, 31–37, 87–88, 164, 179, 226 Garreau, Joel, 214, 217 Geigerich, Wolfgang, 4 Geller, Stephan, 90 gemetria. See numbers Gentz, William, 128 Ghandi, 110 Gilgamesh, 44, 47 Girard, Rene, 166 Glantz, James, 21 glory, 25, 88, 92, 95, 112, 115–16, 198–99 Gospel of Thomas, 152–53 grace, 152 Green Knight, 126 Greenspahn, 137 Grinnell, George, 38 Gutierrez, Gustavo, 123, 215 Halliburton, David, 81, 93 Hamilton, Edith, 48 Harris, Stephen L., 31, 43, 63, 86, 88, 95, 97, 100, 147, 205, 236 heaven, 225–31 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 80, 81, 94, 237 Heim, S. Mark, 109 Heisenberg, Werner, x hell, 225–31 Hendel, Ronald, 45, 234, 236 Henig, Robin, 15–16 hero myth, xi, 7–11, 22–3, 31, 39, 53, 66, 69, 78, 81, 107, 123, 146, 201, 208 Hillman, James, 8 history, 53, 87, 97–98 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 7–8, 108 Holloway, Richard, 82, 89 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 36, 230 Horus, 65, 78 Humphreys, W. Lee, 121, 123–24 idols, 80, 90, 103 Inanna, 42

I NDEX

253

intrinsic and extrinsic law, 93–94, 103, 109, 176, 230 Isaac, 58–64 Isaak, Mark, 44 Isaiah, 84, 107–8, 147, 158, 167, 176, 187, 190, 209, 220 Ishtar, 47, 78 Izod, John, 8

Lewis, C. S., 231 literalism, xii, 2–4, 52–54, 85, 89–90, 133, 203 Lituoline, 139 Lloyd, Seth, 228 logos, vii-xii, 2–6, 32, 52–55, 80–82, 145, 215–16 Lord’s prayer, 168

Jacob, 63–74 Jahweh. See Yahweh Jasper, David and Stephen Prickett, 59 Jeremias, Joachim, 152, 165–67 Job, 115 Johnson, Marshall D., 129 Joseph, 10, 67–75 journey theme, 7–8, 10–11 Joyce, James, 8–9, 39, 81, 225, 230 Judah, 70–71, 93 Jung, C. G., 2, 10, 31, 61, 68, 231

Manabozho, 11, 148 Manu-Smrti, 19–20 Maranto, Gina, 235 Mary, 137–39 Mary Magdalene, 142, 237n2 May, Keith, 5 McElvaine, Robert, 52 McMahon, 152 McVann, Mark, 238 Meeks, Wayne, 233 Melville, Herman, x, 37, 116, 172, 177, 202 Mendenhall, George, 88 Merton, Thomas, 166 messianic kingdom, 110, 135, 145–47, 157, 161, 167, 213–23 midrash, 2, 133 Milton, John, 37, 230 Mitchell , Sephen, 214 monomyth, 19. See also hero myth Morgan, E. S., 93 Morowitz, Harold, 214 Moses, 78–93 Moyers, Bill, 203 Murray, Henry, 3 mystical body, 201–2 mythos, viii, xi, 2–6, 32, 53, 81, 133, 145–46, 213–14, 220–21

Keats. John, 150, 230 Kierkegarrd, Soren, 59 King, Martin Luther, 110 Kinsky, Allan, 236 Knapp, Bettina, 23 Krishna, 21 Kundalini Yoga, 21 Kung, Hans, 230 Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, 6–7 Lakoff, George and Mark Turner, 233 Lanchester, John, 153 Lanier, Jaron, 217 last judgment, 162, 209 law, 54, 88–91 Lawlor, Robert, 33, 137 Leeming, David Adams, 8, 19–21,138–39 Leenhart, Maurice, 52 Lerner, Michael, 105 Levenson, Jon D., 235 Leviathan, 127 Levinas, Emmanuel, 103 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 8

narrative structure, 8–10. See also hero myth Navajo twins, 42 Neihardt, John, 190–91 Neumann, Erich, 234 New Jerusalem, 12, 106, 113, 206, 219, 231

254 New Jewish Publication Society, 91 Noah, 43 Norman, Dorothy, 42, 65, 78 numbers (gematria), 33, 70, 73–74, 196, 206, 208–9, 238n2 Oakes, Maude, 42 Olshen, Barry and Yael Feldman , 90 Omer-Sherman, Ranen, 87, 103 Osiris and Set, 65 Otto, Rudolf, 128 Our Father, 168 Paine, Albert. B., 121 Pals, Daniel, 15, 87 parables, 150: Good Samaritan, 153 Lazurus and Dives, 162 Lost Sheep, 151 Pharisee and the Tax Collector, 151 Prodigal Son, 154 Vineyard, 150 Passover, 84, 176 Paul, 136, 176, 193: Col, 198 1Cor, 199, 201, 208, 217 Heb, 1, 198 Thes, 208. Peck, Scott, 159–60 Pharisees, 135 Pinker, Steven, 233 poetry (biblical), 233n1 Polkinghorne, John B., 179 poststructuralism, 4 Prickett, Sstephen, 9 Promethean heroes, 37, 48 prophets, 102 psyche, 38 Q source, 137, 163 Quetzalcoatl, 137 Rahner, Karl, 220–23, 239 rapture, 207–8 repentence, 107 resurrection, 193 ff

I NDEX retributive justice, 104, 119, 129–30 Reuther, Rosemary Radford, 237 Ricoeur, Paul, 118–19, 133 Rilke, Rainer Maris, 95, 221, 237 ring composition, 60 ritual behavior, 12–13, 103 Romulus and Remus, 42 Ryan, William and Walter Pitman, 234 Sabbath, 31, 90 sacrifice, 12, 22, 46, 54–63, 84–5, 235n3 Sadducees, 135 Samaritans, 153, 140 Sargon, 78 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 230 Satan, 34–35, 37, 116–17, 132, 175, 207, 230 Scarborough, Milton, 23 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 11, 189 Schwartz, Regina, 70 Schweitzer, Albert, 204 second coming of Christ, 204–8 Segal, Robert, 8 Septuagint, 136 Sermon on the Mount, 163 seventh seal, 206 Sheehan, Thomas, 81 Shekinah, 25, 112 Sheler, Jeffrey, 203 Siddhartha, 138 sin, 93–94, 107–8, 158–64, 167, 177 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 126 six hundred and sixty six, 208, 238n2 Smart, Ninian and Richard D. Hecht, 20, 54 Sophia (Wisdom), 20, 111–12, 139, 209, 218 source criticism, 137 Southwell, Robert, 236 Spanos, William V., 236 speech, development of, x, 13–15, 213–14 Spinoza, B., 22 Stein, David, 70

I NDEX Stevens, Wallace, 25, 77, 215 Stookey, Lorena, 44, 48, 55 storytelling, 6–9 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 177 suffering servant, 109–10 supercessionism, 134 synoptic gospels, 137 Tao te Ching, 20 Taylor, Charles, 128 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 216, 219–20 temporality, being toward death, 5–6, 79–81, 216 Thomas, Dylan, 126 Thoreau, Henry David, 39, 115, 178, 227 time, 214, 226–29 Tolkien, J. R. R., 126 Torah. See law transcendence, divine, 18, 39, 92, 115, 124–25, 128–32 Trinity, 198 truth, epistemology, 10, 13, 22–23, 51, 57–58, 128–29, 180–82, 185, 198 Turner, Victor, 188 twins, 41–3, 63–65 types and antitypes, 134–35

255

Vardey, Lucinda, 231 virgin birth, 138–39 virtue, 94–95, 103 Vogler, Christopher, 8 Voytilla, Stuart, 8 wasteland, 9, 36, 107 Watts, Alan, 2, 37, 172, 189–91 Weber, Eugene, 203 Whitman, Walt, 180–82, 218, 223, 227–28 Whore of Babylon, 206–7 widows and orphans, 84, 104–110, 136, 162 Wilber, Treya, 200 Willford, John Noble, 24 Williams, Mentor L., 234 Wilson, Edward O., 2, 17 wisdom literature, 118. See also Sophia Word of God, 20, 32, 34, 139, 145–47, 234n4 worship and ritual. See ritual behavior worship and speech, 15–19, 213–14 Yahweh, 79–80, 94–95 Yeats, William Butler, 26 Zealots, 135