Episode 335: Phillip Lasater - The Self & Personal Agency in the Hebrew Bible
In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with Phillip Lasater about how ancient Israelite and Jewish writers understood the self, personal agency, emotion, and human flourishing in ways that can be very different from modern assumptions. They explore how concepts like fear, the heart, and individuality function in the Hebrew Bible, how texts such as Ruth and Genesis 22 invite readers to engage the interior lives of biblical characters, and how ancient Jewish traditions understood human beings as having the capacity for godlikeness and ethical transformation. Together, they invite listeners to recognize the distance between modern ideas of the autonomous self and ancient biblical conceptions of identity, challenge assumptions readers unconsciously bring to Scripture, and consider how the Bible’s diverse perspectives on human agency and flourishing might reshape the way people understand themselves.
Mentioned in This Episode
-
Pete: [00:00:00] You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas. On today's episode, we're talking about the self and personal agency in the Hebrew Bible with Phillip Lasater.
Pete: Yeah, Phillip is a scholar of Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism at Worcester College Oxford.
Jared: All right, let's dive in.
Phillip: This idea about the capacity for God likeness is, I think, a thread that goes through a lot of these, and that captured what these ancient writers were getting at in their reflections on the self.
To be a human self is to be the sort of creature that has the capacity to become God-like and that ought to become divinized in a way.
Pete: Phillip, welcome to our podcast. It's a pleasure to have you.
Phillip: Thank you very much.
Pete: Well, we're talking today [00:01:00] about a topic that is, I guarantee you, gonna be new to about 99.87% of our listeners, and that is the self and personal agency in the Hebrew Bible. And, um, let's just start with a simple question. What does that mean?
I mean, people coming at this with no background at all, like what do you mean by that?
Phillip: Well, what I mean by it tends to be something along the lines of, uh, issues of individuality, interiority, capacities of thinking-
Jared: Mm-hmm ...
Phillip: and feeling and acting, right? So, uh, I'm not really sure what will pop into the minds of, you know, a lot of people when they hear the word.
It could be something sort of indebted to early modern philosophy like Descartes, where it's some kind of substance that's distinct from materiality. That's not what I mean. I mean, there's just these, these more general conceptual headings of individuality, interiority, reflexivity, and so forth.
Jared: Can you maybe unpack a [00:02:00] little bit about what interiority means? 'Cause again, really what I think is, for a lot of people, they're gonna take these for granted. It's a little bit of the water we swim in, in the modern period. And so helping them become a little bit aware of what we mean, I think there are gonna be people who are gonna be like, "Oh, okay.
I know what that is. That makes sense," but maybe haven't really identified it. So can you say more about interiority?
Phillip: Sure. Uh, it can be anything from the way that maybe the most intuitive example would be something like written liturgical texts or psalms, right? They will talk about all kinds of ways in which, you know, this poetic voice is conveying certain thoughts and feelings, right?
Uh, now there's a whole debate in the history of form criticism and so forth about the degree to which this goes back to sort of autobiographical statements. That's, you know, probably not the case, but, there's nonetheless [00:03:00] this literary presentation of such things. Mm-hmm. But, uh, I mean things beyond, these written liturgical texts as well.
So there are all kinds of important terms that we have in ancient, not only biblical texts, but texts in surrounding cultures in the ancient Near East about the heart, the soul, and so forth, right? So I mean all of these different things, when I talk about issues of selfhood and interiority.
Pete: What brought you to this topic? What, what led you to, to be interested in this? It’s not the kind of thing I thought about certainly when I was in graduate school, but maybe I don't have enough of an imagination to realize this is important, so.
Phillip: Yeah. Uh, yeah. No, that's a fair question. It was a lengthy and very unintended process for me.
So when I was, when I was doing my master's, I started getting interested in notions of fear of God. Uh, [00:04:00] and so I ended up writing my doctoral diss on, uh, conceptions of fear and fear of God in the Old Testament and more broadly in the ancient Near Eastern world, which got me interested in questions about the emotions and more broadly, the history of psychology really because, um, there are some very basic challenges if you spend time translating ancient, texts from West Semitic or East Semitic environments.
There are challenges that come up when you have to start translating, uh, terminology of fear, for example, right? Um, which got me thinking, you know, what exactly is fear? How was this understood in antiquity? Which raised the issue for me of the history of psychology. Uh, and this became important, uh, in my whole process of getting into [00:05:00] this area because, uh, it turns out that pre-modern thinkers didn't really share our concept of emotion.
Uh, they tended to speak in different terms, things like the passions, the affections, and inclinations of the soul. Um, so, uh, it became important, um, things like, you know, our, what we think of as a psychological category of the emotions is rooted in key ways in, really the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th century.
So the category of the emotions is much more recent than we want to assume, I guess- Mm-hmm ... uh, is what I would say. This was part of it. Also just, I was fascinated by the way that the Old Testament has a range of perspectives on things like fear and fear of God, uh, including how it relates to things like human agency, and ethics and, [00:06:00] theology.
So in some texts, um, you have the idea pretty clearly that people are expected to learn how to fear, once they or certain authority figures have the kind of knowledge that generates fear. So there's the idea that knowledge enables fear, right? Uh, in certain texts. So I'm thinking of texts like Deuteronomy 4 or 2 Kings 17, where people have to learn how to fear.
This is explicit language in certain texts. Um, yet there are other texts where, it's a choice to be made, right? So there's a line of texts where, people are expected to choose correctly to fear God. Uh, and in these, you have sometimes the idea that fear is the starting point for knowledge.
So it's kind of the inverse of what I just talked about, [00:07:00] where knowledge leads into fear, you have other texts where fear is the beginning of knowledge instead, right? Um, such that, you know, in these texts, uh, yirah is the Hebrew term that's more common. You have the idea that it's basically an intellectual virtue related to really a process of divinizing the human heart.
Uh, so we can talk about this in certain texts like in Proverbs chapter two, there's an interesting statement about the divinization of human knowledge, by which you come to better understand the idea of fear. So I've talked about now a couple of profiles of fear. There's a third that comes to mind in certain Hebrew Bible texts where basically, it's the idea that God enables fear in people.
Uh, so it's not just something that you learn, not something that you necessarily choose, but something that God enables. So we have texts like [00:08:00] Jeremiah 32 where God endows fear into, uh, the heart of Israel, right? Um, so I was fascinated in this range of portrayals of fear in the Bible.
Something that got me more interested specifically, I'm very interested nowadays in law and legal history, kind of intellectual history of legal traditions. And something that got me more interested in incorporating legal ideas into this was, uh, this goes back to the Psalms, doing some work on Psalm 86.
So there's very interesting things in this Psalm about how divine instruction or Torah is something endowed by God to unify this idea of a divided heart. So there's like a salvific role of law or Torah
in unifying the human person, [00:09:00] in this particular Psalm. So yeah, it was a long Unintended process, in other words, but, lots of things to talk about along these lines. Yeah. I started branching out more into other texts, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo of Alexandria, Fourth Maccabees, and so forth.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so, I mean, the way you're talking about, I think for some people they're gonna say, "This feels really abstract," right? We're talking about emotion and things like that. But for me, I immediately feel this is super relevant because a lot of times people don't understand the distance between us today and the ancient text itself, the compilers, the writers, the readers of this text, and that can be dangerous.
I mean, I think it's very practical to understand these concepts so that when we read fear, for instance, or when we read about agency, or we read about emotions, we're not just assuming this continuity, that they would've understood it the same way we [00:10:00] do, and that there's a one-to-one correspondence.
But, uh, besides that, or maybe building on that, can you talk about why we should care about this? If we're not an academic and we're not just intrigued by it, what does it matter that we understand these ideas?
Phillip: Sure. Um, well, depends, of course, to a degree on who we are, right? Mm-hmm.
Uh, but I mean, I think, for one, I would say that I think life is a whole lot more interesting, in view of these larger issues about meaning and being. So these are getting into questions about, you know, what is a human being? What is human essence, and how does it flourish? Yeah. Uh, so there's a basic sense, in which I think it's almost natural to be interested in such things.
Um, we could also say that [00:11:00] non-academics who read scripture, um, can probably appreciate, uh, Old Testament texts themselves raise these kinds of questions-
Jared: Mm-hmm ...
Phillip: uh, repeatedly about, you know, what is the human being in different ways. Um, we have this in, certain Psalmic texts, like Psalm 8, Psalm 144, a couple of times in the Book of Job.
Um, and I think it raises issues about, um... I mean, there's something at stake here, I think. Uh, it's, I think it's a willingness to be challenged in our reading of scriptural texts and for our own understanding of ourselves to be challenged by engaging these kinds of traditions.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Phillip: Uh, so, um, I mean, my colleague, uh, Hindy Najman, calls this ethical reading of texts.
Jared: Mm-hmm.[00:12:00]
Pete: Well, um, it might help, Phillip, if we can think of maybe a concrete example or two to sort of bring this from the ethereal down to showing us something from the Hebrew Bible itself. Um, I wanna ask, I mean, this is a very related question. I can imagine people thinking, "Oh, I think Phillip's gonna talk about what Moses was feeling and thinking."
I think you're probably gonna say something very different. It's how the writer portrays these people and what, maybe what assumptions the writer has about the self and self-awareness and interiority.
Jared: Can we look at some texts and maybe through that lens talk about some assumptions that maybe modern people will make when we read, like, when we read a narrative about Moses or when it talks about, you mentioned the heart, or these things. We, we're gonna [00:13:00] import our understanding on that, and, like, those are assumptions that if you understood the context, like you've done a lot of research on, well, no, in the ancient world, they would've thought about it differently.
So when we see heart or we see feeling and we see fear, we can't just import our understanding, and here's why, and here's what the differences are. Yeah.
Phillip: So I mean, it's very complicated, right? Because, uh, on the one hand, this terminology, if we stick with the example of fear, this terminology in ancient Hebrew does in fact mean the feeling of being afraid.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Phillip: It just doesn't mean only that. Um, so, it's not that there's a total severance of what we have in mind with fear, but there's a whole kind of, um, I guess, uh, there's a whole set of normative [00:14:00] dimensions of it- that I think it basically is the terminology for submission, yeah?
Jared: Okay.
Phillip: Um.
Jared: Yeah, 'cause when you said choose, I feel like for a lot of people, they would be like, "Well, I don't really choose to be afraid." That's a reaction. But it seems like if the Bible presents it as something you can choose, then there's something else going on.
Phillip: Sometimes it presents it this way.
Jared: Yeah.
Phillip: Mm-hmm. Sometimes it doesn't, right? Um, the other thing, uh, that I, that I heard is about ways of reading. Uh, this is what Pete's brought up, if I'm not mistaken, about kind of are we getting autobiographical-
Pete: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm ...
Phillip: or biographical description of Moses or, uh, no, I don't think so.
I think, you know, most ancient texts from an ancient Israelite or ancient Jewish scribal setting, these are anonymous texts and they presuppose time periods, a good bit later [00:15:00] than typically- the narrative content therein, yeah? Mm-hmm.
Jared: So to ask the question, Pete, I think y- to say, like, when someone says, "What was Moses feeling?"
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: That's gonna be a very-
Pete: Right ...
Jared: um, I mean, like, impossible question to answer.
Pete: Yeah, but I think some people will assume it when we're talking about the self and self-awareness and interiority, and I'm just ... I'm gonna make explicit for our readers, we're not talking about that.
Phillip: Sure. No, that's good. That’s important.
Pete: How writers are talking about things, you know, how a writer is presenting a particular person or a particular event and to pick up assumptions that they make and have every right to make that we might not hear the first time through. Right?
Like, yeah. And fear is a great example of that. Do you have another example? I mean, something in addition to that? Maybe, I mean, whatever you want to say is fine, but I'm thinking of, like, any particular, like, individual characters of [00:16:00] the Bible and what these writers are saying about, you know, the self and personal agency.
Phillip: Sure. Uh, I mean, I think you brought up Moses. That's a very good example. I think it helps to think about how ancient Jews engaged the figure of Moses in these texts. So, um, somebody like Philo of Alexandria, a first-century, Jewish philosopher, he was intensely interested in the figure of Moses because he thought that in the Pentateuchal texts, Moses, he said the same thing about Abraham. They're living laws.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Mm.
Phillip: Um, they're living laws prior to Sinai. They're the same. So Philo actually said that Moses embodies the same law that Abraham embodies, namely God's law. Abraham embodied it long before Moses in such a way that they end up instantiating [00:17:00] living laws.
And what this, uh, means for Philo is that they are perfect examples. They're exemplars about what it means to be properly a human being, right? So we could have the same kind of discussion about how other patriarchal figures were engaged. Uh, so there's a, there's a very important, uh, work from, I think, roughly the same time as Philo, the Book of Fourth Maccabees.
It does the same type of thing with Jacob. Jacob is presented as having mastery of self, mastery of the passions, um, and being pansophos, being all-wise. Mm-hmm. Only God is otherwise called all-wise in Fourth Maccabees, so there's something godlike about Jacob, about Moses, uh, about Abraham in these texts, right?
Uh, but they're serving a kind of ethical... They operate according to Philo and Fourth Maccabees as ethical exemplars or models for other people to follow. [00:18:00]
Jared: I wanna maybe talk about this idea of the self because I think one, maybe one of the reasons I was getting confused or, or jumping the gun earlier- Mm-hmm
with, with your question was because, again, I, I feel like there is these very basic questions that some people will ask. Like, for instance, like you're saying, people are like, "Well, what were they feeling and how..." Like, they wanna get into the character, and I think one of the things I'm interested in is, like how that's not a really good question because of this distance between us and the text.
And one of the things I'm interested in is this idea of the self. So even the idea that I am a self and I can sort of think of myself. You mentioned Descartes, you mentioned, like, 18th century Scottish Enlightenment. We are very influenced by those ideas. Yeah. And it's hard to reach back behind that curtain and say, "Yeah, but how would they have thought it differently?"
Like, I can barely even [00:19:00] think about it differently because it's, we are so influenced by it. It is like the glasses that we have on constantly. So when we think about the self, how would maybe they have conceptualized it, and how is that different than maybe the average person on the street thinks about themselves and this idea of selfhood that they've inherited, that they don't even realize they've inherited?
They just think everybody's always thought that way. Does that make sense?
Phillip: Yeah, of course. Um, I mean, I think, I think what you're getting at is the way that a lot of Americans, a lot of Europeans take for granted forms of individualism that are endemic to basically the political philosophy of liberalism, and I mean that simply in the sense of the political philosophy from Locke, Hobbes, uh, Kant, these, these sorts of figures.
Right. Right? I mean, Kant, uh, if you read him, he talks about how, you know, the, the, the human being is an end in himself. [00:20:00]
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Phillip: Right? Uh, this is the idea of, you know, freestanding, um, kind of self-contained, autonomous entities of the self, right? Um, uh, I think part of the issue is that in these same settings, we often dismiss the idea of human nature.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Phillip: This is an outgrowth of the same, of the same tradition. I think ideas of nature are fundamental to the ancient ideas of the selves. Mm-hmm. Uh, the idea of human essence, I mentioned, uh, Hindy Najman, my colleague, uh, recently, but she has an article that came out a couple of years ago about imitatio dei, and the idea of human essence in ancient Judaism as the capacity for godlikeness.
Pete: Mm.
Phillip: Um, and, uh, this idea about the capacity for godlikeness is, I think, a thread that goes through a lot of these, and that's captured what's these ancient writers, [00:21:00] uh, were getting at in their reflections on the self. To be, to be a human self is to be the sort of creature that has the capacity to become godlike and that ought to become divinized in a way.
Mm-hmm.
Jared: Yeah, that, and that, that word ought to seems to play in, like what you were saying earlier, that especially, maybe even into the first century and beyond, people would've seen, like, a Moses as an ethical exemplar toward this divinization. Meaning sort of God as the ethical example for what it means to be, like, the, I don't know the words that they would use, but, like, the most moral or most ethical person is going to look most like God, and that is part of what it means to be human, is to have that capacity to grow in that direction, and to be a good, flourishing human is to fulfill that capacity in this way. Is that a fair way of saying that?
Phillip: I think so, yeah.
Jared: Okay.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Jared: Yeah. [00:22:00]
Pete: So, um, is there a particular maybe story that might illustrate, I think, uh, that you really like, I mean, in addition to fear, ancient understandings in the Hebrew Bible of the self?
Again, I'm trying to give our listeners/viewers just something very concrete to build off of to have-
Phillip: Mm-hmm ...
Pete: a better chance of grasping what we're talking about. 'Cause there's a lot, there are a lot of things being thrown in, 'cause it's a complicated topic. It's not.. . and we like that around here.
We like complicated topics. Right. Yeah. Um, maybe an illustration to help concretize that even better.
Phillip: Sure. Um, I mean, I think the examples that I mentioned earlier about Abraham and Moses are a place to start. Mm-hmm. The Book of Ruth is a great place to start. Because the Book of Ruth, uh, um Uh, readers might be familiar with [00:23:00] the, the story generally about this Moabite woman who is engaged very actively in a process of kind of identity negotiation-
Jared: Mm.
Phillip: Uh, and, um, a refinement of, uh, of the self. And the book is about how, um, this Moabite who is not really supposed to be integrated into Israel according to, uh, certain texts in Deuteronomy, uh, does precisely that. She is integrated into Israel, right? Um.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Phillip: Uh, and there's a book that came out several years ago called, um...
It's by Susan Niditch called The Responsive Self. And, uh, she has an interesting discussion there about how the Book of Ruth, probably from the Persian period, uh, um, because of the way that it seems to presuppose a number of texts, not only from Deuteronomy, but even later parts of the Pentateuch like, uh, Leviticus 17 to 26, and also the way that [00:24:00] it resembles the conflicts in kind of Ezra-Nehemiah.
She dates it to this period, which I think is probably correct. Uh, but the book, uh, she says, seems to be written in a way that gets readers... It tries to get readers interested in the thoughts and the feelings of the characters without, uh, identifying exactly all the time what they are feeling or something, right?
So I think our access to ancient notions of the self are just unavoidably complicated, as you say, and they're going to be mediated through this very, very rich and also highly, um, refined literature, right? Through editorial processes and whatnot. I mean, this is the unavoidable filter for getting a sense of these things.
Mm-hmm. We're limited to texts.
Pete: Right. [00:25:00] Right.
Phillip: The texts show strategies according to Niditch that show a scribal interest in, in getting people thinking in these terms.
Pete: Okay. You know, it's interesting. Um, I mean, you're, you're jogging my memory here, but Eric Auerbach decades ago wrote an essay- Odysseus' scar.
And one point that he was making, I ho- hope I'm not gonna jumble his point, but yeah, Greek literature's all about psychology and what's going on and what's happening behind the scenes, and the Hebrew Bible's pretty sparse about that. And I wonder if that is a challenge, uh, you know, for, uh, y- you don't have the neat data sets perhaps in the Hebrew Bible that you might in other literature.
Phillip: I think it's different from a lot of, uh, Greek literature, but, uh, let's not forget that a lot of ancient Jewish literature was in fact written in Greek. Uh-
Pete: Mm-hmm ...
Phillip: uh, and also I think it's, I would probably just more fundamentally disagree that we don't [00:26:00] have it-
Pete: Mm-hmm ...
Phillip: in ancient Jewish texts.
I think that this is, there's an influential, there's an influential very modern idea that, um, uh, there's a, there's a disconnect between, uh, Hebrew and Greek ways of thinking. Mm-hmm. You have this sort of practical Hebrew, uh, concrete way of thinking versus the sophisticated Greek theoretical way. Uh, and this is, I think, just not true.
Pete: Mm.
Phillip: If that's kind of, uh, the issue that you're raising, I think that's an important issue-
Pete: Mm-hmm ...
Phillip: to point out as problematic. I think there's, the way that ancient Jewish texts written in Hebrew and Aramaic raise these issues goes about it differently from a- Well, maybe- ... a Greek philosophical text.
Pete: Can I just, just very briefly, um- You know, [00:27:00] the binding of Isaac, right? Uh-huh. The Akedah, Genesis 22. Um, every year when I do this with my students, somebody invariably raises their hand and says, "Would you... What was Abraham thinking when they went up the mountain?"
I said, "Good question. What does the text say?" And they said, "Nothing." Yeah. I said, "Exactly. It doesn't say anything, but is the writer..." I think what you're saying, Phillip, if I'm right, the writer is getting you to grapple with that somehow.
Phillip: Yes. This is another very good example this specific text. I know we mentioned Abraham earlier, but this text is also showing the same kind of scribal technique, right? Where-
Pete: Right ...
Phillip: there's something... It's almost unsettling how chill everybody is in this story. Right?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Phillip: But it's, but it's written in a way where, it's the same literary technique.
I mean, Jean-Louis Ska said the same thing about Genesis 22, that it's inviting a kind of participatory reading.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Phillip: Uh, tries to get readers to [00:28:00] engage the thoughts and the feelings of the characters. Right?
Phillip: And clearly was happening in antiquity that, because, you know, the early reception of Genesis 22 and texts like Jubilees and texts like the Book of James in the New Testament or Hebrews, they take this text further in different ways than what, uh, the Hebrew text does, and they do it, I think, because they are engaging in precisely, it seems, the way that the text is inviting them to, right? I mean, Jubilee basically blends Genesis 22 with the Satan figure from the Book of Job. Whereas, um, you know, the, the ones in James and Hebrews seem to actually think that maybe, just maybe Isaac was actually sacrificed-
Pete: Mm
Phillip: and raised, right? Because, again, at the end of the Hebrew version of [00:29:00] Genesis 22, only Abraham leaves the mountain, which is kind of-
Pete: What happened to Isaac? Exactly, right. Yeah.
Phillip: So, but I think this is trying to get us thinking about what he is thinking and feeling, what the character is thinking and feeling.
Pete: Yeah. That's very helpful. It's an invitation. Yeah, it's an invitation. So, I won't cut off the discussion the next time a student asks me that. I'll actually encourage them to think about, you know, the interior life of an Abraham or Isaac or the two servants that have come with them, and yeah.
That's a great point. They're very chill.
Phillip: And it uses fear terminology as well. Yeah. Right? Uh, uh, the same term, right? Of, pointing to the submission of Abraham.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Phillip: Right?
Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jared: How does this tie to this idea of personal agency? So when we think about interiority, how does it connect to the idea of agency in the Hebrew Bible?
Phillip: We could answer it a couple of ways. [00:30:00] Uh, if we want to stick with the terminology of the emotions or fear, it just fits into different profiles of agency. The Old Testament has a variety of profiles, basic anthropological profiles or conceptions of agency. So in certain texts, uh, you have the idea that to, to embody yirah or fear is just a natural function of the human heart, right?
Uh, I can list off texts like Deuteronomy 20 verse one seems to assume this, Isaiah 7:3-4, Psalm 27, and so forth. You have other texts that get more explicitly into agency, I think, uh, where you have the idea that, um, the human heart properly regulated by a human being will generate fear, right? So, it basically requires certain [00:31:00] types of effort, whether that's disciplining the passions, whether that's, you know, um, gaining wisdom and growing in wisdom, something along these lines.
Sometimes this is the kind of agency that allows fear to emerge, right? Uh, whereas other texts have a much more limited idea of human agency, that human beings aren't really good at conducting themselves in the ways that would properly generate fear of God, right? Uh, and so you have to have a divinely regulated heart in order to generate fear.
So this is exactly what's going on, it seems, in Jeremiah 32, this covenant, uh, this, uh, the Oracle of the Everlasting Covenant, right? Um, where God inserts fear into Israel's heart, right? Assumption seems to be that human nature isn't so, uh, far gone [00:32:00] that they have no agency or something, because the assumption is the human heart is salvageable.
It just needs God to place the fear into it. You have a more radical idea of agency, it seems, in Ezekiel than Jeremiah, because in Ezekiel, the heart is not even salvageable, right? So this is yet another profile, I think, right? So, you have a sort of heart surgery in Jeremiah 32 and a complete heart transplant in Ezekiel.
So this is the more, this is the more critical, reserved view of what it seems the human heart is capable of doing.
Jared: Yeah. It’s funny, I can't help but think of this mapping onto how certain Protestant traditions develop a lot of theology out of these, and it's interesting that they try to systematize.
What I'm hearing you say is, well, the text isn't univocal. It doesn't have one voice on this. There's certain aspects, [00:33:00] that think of it this way and that way, but then we've built these theologies around this idea. I mean, Presbyterian theologies of predestination and other things are where do we land on this agency part of the human?
Is there a parallel between some of these doctrines that get developed later in these texts that seem to posit human nature as how far gone are we? You know, how much heart surgery do we need? Do we need a transplant? Do we just need surgery? Or it's actually part of a natural function that's kinda doing this on its own anyway.
Phillip: Yeah, I mean, there's no question that these have played a large role in the history of Christian theology, starting within, you know, the New Testament, where the longest quotation from the Old Testament from the, it wouldn't have been the Hebrew Bible for Hebrews, but, uh, the longest quotation [00:34:00] from ancient Jewish scriptures is actually the new covenant oracle from Jeremiah in the Book of Hebrews, where it's the idea that basically the heart is salvageable and God's law is that which rectifies the human self.
So, this is Jeremiah 31, because there it's not fear, it's just divine Torah engraved into the salvageable heart. So the human heart needs law, and that's what perfects the self. So, uh, yeah, there are, I would, yeah, there's a range of perspectives, I think. Um, and I think that these texts are not interested in being systematized.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Right.
Phillip: They aren't presented in a systematic way. That's maybe a-
Pete: Mm-hmm ...
Jared: Do we have these ideas ever talking to each other in the Hebrew Bible? I think of other areas where later traditions kind of pick up and start to either push back or further these when it comes to the idea of agency.
Phillip: Sure. Yeah, yeah.
Jared: Do we have, like, texts [00:35:00] talking to each other?
Phillip: I think so. I think so. I think, there are interesting cases where we seem to have, I mean, we've mentioned Jeremiah 31, the new covenant oracle where divine law perfects the heart. We've mentioned Jeremiah 32, where fear perfects the heart.
These are both about actually just Israel. You know, it's this idea that, um, it's a metaphorical presentation of Israel as an individual moral agent, right? What's interesting is that, um, we have certain liturgical texts, I'm thinking of Psalm 86 and Psalm 40. Psalm 86 seems to be an individualization of this idea that divine instruction is what unifies the heart.
Because in Psalm 86 verse 11, you have this idea that [00:36:00] divine Torah is that which actually unifies the heart of the psalmist. Um, but then we have a text like Psalm 40, very interesting, uh, as well, because in Psalm 40, there's a bit of a twist. The way that I read, and a number of other scholars, at least in the European tradition where I was trained, read Jeremiah 31, and 32 for that matter, is that, um, both of them are presenting a complete perfection of human nature, whether it's from divine law or fear.
Psalm 40 picks up on this idea about the law is engraved in my innards, it says. Um, and on my heart it's engraved, right? But after this, it says, "My heart has forsaken me," right? And so you have the [00:37:00] idea that even once divine law is written in your heart, the heart can still forsake you. I mean, this is, I mean, a- and it- it's, uh, azav.
I mean, it says, you know, "My heart has forsaken me," but this is after it presents law having been engraved into the heart. Uh, so, this is another case where we could think of it in Psalm 40 as a kind of individualizing one of these prophetic oracles from Jeremiah, but also it kind of problematizes the idea that once you have this unification of the human heart and so forth, then that's it.
Psalm 40 pretty clearly assumes that you can sort of undo it, right? Um, so, uh, that would be, those are a couple of examples where I think there are texts that are engaging other texts and doing creative things with them.
Jared: Hmm.
Phillip: I hope that's an- [00:38:00] answering your question a bit.
Jared: Yeah, yeah.
And especially helpful was the idea, too, that Jeremiah, it presents Israel as an individual, right? That it's a collective noun, if you will. And then the Psalm furthers that and actually individuates that to a person. And I think that's a helpful way to frame this.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
I think we're getting close here unfortunately, Jared, but I would like to ask, how might the Hebrew Bible challenge modern notions of authenticity, self, and the individual? And, um, again, I'm thinking like, well, modern people lean more towards this, but the Hebrew Bible leans more [00:39:00] towards this, if we can make it that simple.
I don't know if that's asking too much, but…
Phillip: Sure. Sure. I think what we talked about earlier, our indebtedness to the political philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant- Mm-hmm ... where, um, our notion of being a self is to be an individual who has my own sort of personal realm of freedom, and what matters is that you give me the room to sort of be myself, this sort of authenticity ideal, right?
I think that ancient ideas of the self and human flourishing in the Old Testament, and the New Testament for that matter, are much more tied to ideas of submission.
Pete: Hmm.
Phillip: Uh, so it probably wouldn't be appealing at all to think about this sort of self-contained, freestanding individual.
It's very much more about submission. Uh, [00:40:00] and if you read, you know, Philo, if we take ancient figures as the focus, then, you know, Philo has a treatise on freedom, right? Um, and, you know, he talks about freedom aligning with what is in fact good, and what is in fact good is not something that I can sort of just create for myself, right?
Uh, so once again, it's the idea of submission to goodness versus sort of, uh, authenticity. Mm-hmm. Uh, that's probably how I would start that kind of a discussion.
Pete: Okay.
Jared: Well, I think that's interesting. Maybe just to further that a little bit, because I mean, this is not, I think, irrelevant to where we find ourselves today in some ways.
How, whenever they think of themselves, is it, you said as a freestanding individual versus submission. So how do those relate? Is it that [00:41:00] submission within a context, is that within divine context, like submitting to God, or there's also submission to cultural and social roles that I find myself in?
It is like how constitutive is fear to the self in the ancient world versus to today? How far can we stretch that idea of submission and fear in the ancient world?
Phillip: Uh, I mean, it of course depends on kind of what text we're talking about. Okay. But, if we think about biblical texts and ancient Jewish texts more widely, I mean, we could have a discussion about, you know, submission to the constraints of human nature as that, uh-
Jared: Okay
Phillip: that entity that is able to become godlike, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and how do you become godlike? Well, you know, this has to do with a whole other range of things that probably we have no [00:42:00] time to get into. But certainly in, you know, biblical text, it's, you know, the temple, the priesthood, all of this, right?
Jared: And that, all of that would be how we are to think of the self. It’s constitutive of all of that, right? Our, our relation to these-
Phillip: I mean, the logic of submission, I would say is relevant to all of that.
Jared: Right ... And the logic of submission is connected to how we think of ourselves.
That's an important concept.
Phillip: I think so, yes. Because, it's the idea that you don't choose your nature.
Jared: Right. Right.
Phillip: Right. Yeah. Um, and that nature, according to somebody like Philo, we could have the same discussion about Aristotle if we wanted to, but, you know, nature is something that whether you like it or not, it constrains what it means for you to flourish.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And again, that seems a little bit tied to this agency sense where there are more constraints in that [00:43:00] way.
Phillip: Mm-hmm.
Jared: Yeah. Um, and so that is either accepted as, maybe it's a negative thing, but it must be accepted, or it's a positive thing, these constraints. Um, and that's a little bit different than maybe how we think of it today.
Phillip: Yeah.
Jared: Okay.
Phillip: Yeah, yeah.
Jared: All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Phillip. I think this is a stretch topic.
Pete: It's a stretch topic.
Jared: Yeah.
Pete: Yeah, good.
Jared: That's good.
Pete: Excellent. They need to be stretched, these people. Huh? Okay. These normal people.
Jared: All right. One last thing.
If you made it this far, you're clearly the kind of person who thinks about this stuff more than is probably necessary.
Pete: We say that with love, but you're not alone. We are also those people.
Jared: Community for us folks who do a lot of extra thinking, it's called the Society of Normal People, which, yes, we know is a little ironic given what we just said, but it's a good group, smart and weird in the right ways, and not trying to convince anyone of anything.
Pete: Come be weird with us. The link is in the show notes, or go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com.
Jared: Front slash join. I forgot to
put it [00:44:00] in.
