Acquiring a body of light through speech

Here's how to do it: read Seth Sanders' essay in this collection of early Jewish and Christian Mysticism studies:

It investigates mysticism as linguistic practice by comparing Babylonian and Second Temple Jewish journeys to heaven. Previous debate focused on how the first heavenly journeys emerged and whether they were vision or fiction: did people think they could actually become angels? It contains some of the core arguments of my forthcoming Myths of Revelation (in revision for Brill) draws on linguistic anthropology to reexamines Jewish mysticism’s ancient Near Eastern roots. The experiences behind the texts are lost, but we can historically trace the possibilities they generated through verbal performance. Rather than an essence, Jewish mysticism was a constellation of new genres and ritual roles that let participants realize ancient Near Eastern myth under the imperial politics of Hellenism. And seeing mystical discourse concretely, as both textual interpretation and ritual action, raises new questions: how do changes in written participant roles affect our very idea of human nature and its limits?

Mythic and Ritual Genocides in the Bible, or, Why We Should be Afraid to Read Atrocities as Stories and Why We Need To.

A talk for students of the Trinity College Religion Department on what many have seen as the most morally difficult part of the Hebrew Bible: divinely commanded genocides, and trying to figure out how we can respond to them in a way that is moral but not anachronistic.

Those who wish to remind themselves of the worst parts of the Old Testament are invited to glance at Joshua 6-8 and I Samuel 15, which look rather fictional, and compare it to the actual 9th-century BCE inscription of Mesha, king of Moab (also mentioned and fought against in the Bible), who uses precisely the Biblical vocabulary of ritual genocide to claim:

“And I killed all the people of the city as a sacrifice for Kemosh and for Moab. And I brought back the fire-hearth of his uncle from there; and I brought it before the face of Kemosh in Qerioit, and I made the men of Sharon live there, as well as the men of Maharit. And Kemosh said to me, "Go, take Nebo from Israel." And I went in the night and fought against it from the daybreak until midday, and I took it and I killed the whole population: seven thousand male subjects and aliens, and female subjects, aliens, and servant girls. For I had put it to the ban for Ashtar Kemosh.”

It will draw on the pioneering work of Lauren Monroe, "Israelite, Moabite and Sabaean War-herem Traditions and the Forging of National Identity: Reconsidering the Sabaean Text RES 3945 in Light of Biblical and Moabite Evidence," Vetus Testamentum (2007) 318-341.

As well as Bruce Lincoln's wonderfully challenging little essay, "Myth and History in the Study of Myth: An Obscure Text of Georges Dumézil, Its Context and Subtext" in his Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology & Practice (Chicago, 1991)

And perhaps Michael Taussig's wild, intelligent, loosely-argued but usefully provocative "The Language of Flowers".

The Mythic Foundations of Western Political Thought

Says Seth: An argument that I started having with myself about where politics comes from. I picked it in my first book, and this semester I have the chance to share this argument with 7 intrepid students.

REL 219 MYTHIC FOUNDATIONS OF WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT
Course Outline

It’s often assumed that religion is just a cover for politics: having God on your side justifies anything, no matter how costly or self-serving. But what if it’s actually the other way around--what if religion is the source of politics? If not, why did ancient people treat kings like Gods, and why do we still obey rulers we've never met? We will study myths of foundation and order from the world's first states in Mesopotamia and their legacy in the Bible. In these myths God gains sovereignty by slaying Leviathan, the cosmic dragon. We will analyze some alternatives that Western political thought offers: are they more reasonable? Did the West ultimately abolish Leviathan or has it merely replaced it with its own myths?

TEXTBOOKS:
Required:
Mark Lilla The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West
David Graeber Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge textbook version)
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology
Simon Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry
Benjamin Foster Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature

Recommended:
David Miller Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
Marc Van de Meiroop A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 - 323 BC
God, The Holy Bible (HarperCollins study bible or any other version)



SCHEDULE OF TOPICS, READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS:
1. Tuesday, January 20 Introduction.

2. Thursday, January 22 Political Philosophy as a Great Separation
Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God
“The Crisis,” “The Great Separation”

3. Tuesday, January 27 Separation and its Discontents
Lilla, “The Ethical God,”
Add/Drop Period ends. Last day to declare a class Pass/Low Pass/Fail.

4. Thursday, January 29 Why The State?
David Graeber, Fragments 46-70
David Miller, Political Philosophy chapters 1 and 2

5. Tuesday, February 3 The Foundation of God’s Kingdom
from Foster, Before the Muses “The Valorous Sun; Hammurabi, King of Justice”
from van de Mieroop, the Old Babylonian Period
First 3-page paper: Examining an Argument in Political Philosophy:
From any of the readings, analyze in depth one argument about one point
First page: analyze how the argument works and what it is trying to accomplish, what is at stake in this particular debate.
Second page: go through the evidence and steps. Be precise, citing the most decisive phrases and sentences by page number (no need for block quotes) and, every time you cite, analyze what it's accomplishing in the argument.
Third page: where would you go from here? If not fully convinced what would you need to decide? If convincing what can you do with it now?


6. Thursday, February 5 The Slaying of Leviathan
from Foster, Before the Muses “The Epic of Creation”

7. Tuesday, February 10 The State’s Ancient Other: The West Semitic Ideal I
Thorkild Jakobsen, “Primitive Democracy in Mesopotamia”

Read the two very short, but important, letters from Adad (the local West Semitic version of Marduk) to Zimri-Lim in Foster 143-144.
What theory of legitimacy is implied in the second letter? How does it compare to the theory of legitimacy Hammurabi propounds in the epilogue to the laws? How does it compare to the theory of the Epic of Creation?

8. Thursday, February 12 Negotiated Sovereignty: The West Semitic Ideal II
From Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, Baal epic

9. Tuesday, February 17 Divine Myths of Justice: Yahweh Dethrones the Gods
from Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, Kirta epic
Psalm 82

10. Thursday, February 19 Human Myths of Justice: Absalom Dethrones David
II Samuel
from Herodotus, History

11. Tuesday, February 24 Human Myths of Justice: Killing a Tyrant
Judges
From Livy, Roman History
From Dumezil, “Myth into History” in Archaic Roman Religion

Thursday, February 26 No class--Trinity days

12. Tuesday, March 3 Classical vs. Biblical Political Myth
Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Critique of Political Reason"

13. Thursday, March 5 The Messiah: the death and resurrection of a political myth
Isaiah, Suffering Servant
KTU 1.161 Ugaritic funerary ceremony
Daniel 7 son of man
Gospels Son of Man passages
SECOND PAPER: The Ideals of an Ancient Myth

14. Tuesday, March 10 Is the State a Machine for Happiness?
from Aristotle, Politics

15. Thursday, March 12 Is the State a Ritual Device?
From Aristotle, Politics
Dupont, Florence (1989) ‘The Emperor-God's Other Body', in Michel Feher et al. ( eds) Zone 5: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3


Tuesday, March 17 SPRING VACATION

Thursday, March 19 SPRING VACATION

16. Tuesday, March 24 Religion as a Tool for Politics
Machiavelli, from Discourses on Livy

17. Thursday, March 26 Politics as a Tool for Religion
Hocart, from Kings and Councilors

18. Tuesday, March 31 Politics as Cosmology
Geertz, from Negara
Quentin Skinner, review of Geertz

19. Thursday, April Jurisprudence as Myth and Ritual: The Medieval King’s Two Bodies
Kantorowicz, from The King’s Two Bodies: An Essay in Medieval Political Theology
THIRD PAPER: A Medieval Political Myth

20. Tuesday, April 7 The Return of Leviathan
Hobbes, from Leviathan

21. Thursday, April 9
Hobbes, from Leviathan

22. Tuesday, April 14
Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

23. Thursday, April 16
Lincoln, Religion, Empire and Torture

24. Tuesday, April 21
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology

25. Thursday, April 23
Lilla, Stillborn God
FOURTH PAPER: Modern Political Myth

26 Tuesday, April 28
Simon Critchley, “Crypto-Schmittianism”
http://www.stateofnature.org/crypto-schmit.html

Take-home exam.

Why you can't Dig up a Nation-State

Jacob Taubes used to say that there were some books whose essence was conveyed in the title. I recall that among them was Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: the great point of the book was that Geist (which means more than "spirit"--it includes thought, so it's the thing that stands behind both intellectual and spiritual things) has a phenomenology, that you can learn what you need to know about it by thinking about what it does. Up til then it had seemed to be graspable only by either art or metaphysics--Hegel argued that its mechanisms were traceable in history. What's so wonderful about that wasn't that he was right but that he made Fredric Jameson possible. I know that sounds silly. What I intend to convey by that is that he laid the philolosophical foundation for a view of history in which the material and spiritual, technology and culture, are understood to be legible as a whole. And if you can possibly do it right (it's HARD) this is the best (only) way to do history and culture--heck, to do anthropology, literature and--yes--philology.

There are other books, less important but also interesting, that give away their main point on the first page. Ian Hodder's Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture, is one. (BTW anyone who dismisses, out of hand, the intellectual breadth of Evangelical educational institutions should ponder the fact that the University of Chicago's mighty Regenstein library had to Inter-Library-Loan me this baby from Wheaton College).

On the first page, Hodder describes those similar clusters of objects people dig up out of the ground ("Israelite," "Mongol," "Chinese") as "material 'cultures.'" This is a rare case where the scare quotes pack a punch, rather than suck the air out of the room: you look at the typography, wonder why he's put it in quotes, and then you think: "Ah, he's asking how we know they're cultures at all--precisely how do we get from clusters of pottery styles to structures of thought and action?" Once you question the assumption that artifact types directly correlate with culture--like ethnic boundaries and self-identification, let alone language or "race" (can't possibly type out enough scare quotes to deflate that one) you're left with a gaping hole at the center of your method: you dig up a pattern and call it a culture, while knowing nothing at all about what the people who made it thought about it.

Hodder, being a professional archaeologist, has to build around this gaping hole, but I don't know how successfully he plugs it. I ponder the consequences for Biblical Studies here

Where Do Empires Come From? Israel, Assyria, and the Question of U.S. Imperialism

Why is God supposed to be a universal political ruler, and why do people think America wants to conquer the world? The two questions are related, and perhaps they're also inseparable from what we study as Biblicists: what the Israelites learned from Assyria.

One of the most interesting recent doctoral theses I've heard about is Cyntha Chapman's The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter, which was done at Harvard with Peter Machinist and is now published. She makes clear that those famous Assyrian royal inscriptions and reliefs, showing the king as a decisive and utterly dominating force, whose enemies are described as soiling themselves in fear and depicted as cringing, kowtowing or mounted on stakes, is what you'd call a performance of masculinity. That is, he didn't just kill lots of people, he did it in style, and talked about it relentlessly. Her second point is that, in Biblical literature of the 7th century B.C.E. and later, Jerusalem is depicted overwhelmingly as a woman, the violated and forlorn "daughter Zion" of Lamentations. But if the Assyrian king is a masculine dominator and Jerusalem is a female victim, what does that make God? Chapman's book works out the prophetic answer.

The consequences of this go far beyond poetry: Israelite writers thought a lot about empire, comparing Israel to the succession of men who, in trampling through their small country, claimed to be carrying a mission to rule the world. They thought about how they were and weren't like their imperial rulers. Empire was imprinted on their consciousness.

Though its core is older, Psalm 89 became an icon of this:

21) I found David my servant, with my holy oil I anoint him.
22) Who my hand shall accompany and make firm,
indeed my arm will make him strong
23) No enemy shall oppose him, no lowly one afflict him.
24) And I crush his enemies before him,
I will strike down his haters
25) And my faithfulness and steadfastness will be with him,
and in my name shall his horn be raised.
26) And I place his hand on the sea, and his right on the rivers.
27) He shall declare to me,
“You are my father, my God and the Rock of my victory!”
28) Indeed, I will appoint him firstborn,
highest of the kings of the world
29) I will maintain my steadfastness with him forever,
and my covenant will faithfully endure…

But the rest of the prayer reverses this triumph, mourning how God has let David's dominance be shattered--God's covenant, it seems, did not faithfully endure. The psalm is almost an incantation, summoning God to pony up, demonstrate his vaunted faith, and restore his side of the bargain. The prayer dares God to be a real imperial ruler.

I would argue that what we see here, in the precise imprint left by an empire on a subject people, is nothing less than the secret of empire itself: that people learn from it, imitate it, and use these lessons to form new empires. The Bible carries the marks of Assyria and Persia and was used as a model for new empires after Rome.

This point was originally made by Sheldon Pollock, a scholar of Sanskrit, who pointed out that since imperialism is not a natural phenomenon, but must be learned in every detail from others, we would do well to think about how this learning takes place. He first made it at this soon-to-be-published conference on the Lessons of Empire, along with John Kelly, who asked if the U.S. is really an empire today (if it is, how are corporations that can take money and deploy military force not? or is the term blinding us to what's really going on?) and Iraq scholar and Jonah Goldberg golf buddy Juan Cole. The book should be a doozy.

Pollock and Kelly first asked these questions of the Ancient Near East at our conference in February, and I'm editing their contributions right now. This book should be a doozy too.

Models in Biblical Studies

I've been thinking recently about the models we use in Biblical Studies.

The twentieth century opened with Hermann Gunkel's use of an oral-poetic model, influenced by the brilliant studies of folklore that his philological and Romantic predecessors such as the brothers Grimm and Herder had pioneered. The most interesting study of this work, and its legacy for the study of difference and modernity itself, is Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman's Voices of Modernity, which despite a bit of Latour damage, I cannot recommend highly enough.

But we stuck with the folk model throughout the whole 20th century, even when we knew better. From Albright to Cross to Niditch, studies of Israelite orality have continued to posit relatively pristine societies that lived by the magical spoken word and mystified writing as well.

In addition to stuff that's closer geographically (Moab, Carchemish, Assyria), I am looking for material that provokes me to think more useful thoughts. And one of the main places I turn is Medieval and early Modern India. Unlike the pristine folk cultures imagined by Gunkel, South Asia represents a radically polyglot milieu which had had multiple high languages and writing systems (think Babylonian, Egyptian and Assyrian dominance) as well as a variety of vernaculars (think of the spectrum of Aramean, Edomite, Greek, Phoenician, Philistine, Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian, as well as the Judean/Israelite splits, which fracture culture in Israel). So when Sumit Guha suggests historical studies charting "the co-evolution of language and identity," I'm right there with him.

The point is most emphatically not that India under the Raj was somehow "more like" Israel under Assyria than a group of German peasants in the Schwarzwald (or, more to the point, Francophone housekeepers), though that may be true--the point is that, among many productive ways of seeing the interplay of tradition, difference and change in history, South Asian studies has access to a number of privileged examples and is using them in ways that might help all of us think.

Why Study the Hebrew Bible?

And here's my pitch for what I do with my life, in the form of another course writeup:

This course introduces the most popular book in history, and the main thing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have in common. The Hebrew Bible’s determining force in Western culture is connected to its remarkable political and theological claim that it contains commands by the ruler of the universe to his subjects. Yet this book appears, on closer inspection, to be no book at all but a collection of disparate documents put together by an imperial subject people. Through careful reading of the text in translation, we will explore the Bible as both a marginal ancient literature and a voice of supreme power. We will direct our readings and questions with key texts in the history of modern Bible criticism and the ancient Near East.

We'll be using:
Adele Berlin, ed. The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford U P, 2003)
John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Augsburg Fortress, 2004)
Richard Elliott Freedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997)
Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (Princeton U P, 1994)
Martti Nissinen, Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (Society of Biblical Literature, 2003)