2.6. The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru
THE THIRD great area where we can look at the development of consciousness is certainly the most interesting and profound. All through the Middle East toward the end of the second millennium B.C., there were large amorphous masses of halfnomadic peoples with no fixed dira or grazing ground. Some were the refugees from the Thera destruction and the terrible Dorian invasions which followed. One cuneiform tablet specifically speaks of migrations pouring down through the Lebanon. Others were probably refugees from the Assyrian invasions and were joined by the Hittite refugees when that empire fell to a further invasion from the north. And still others may have been the resistant bicameral individuals of the cities who could not silence the gods so easily, and who, if not killed, would be progressively sifted out into the desert wilderness.
A mixture of men, then, coming together precariously for a time, and then separating out, some perishing, others organizing into unstable tribes; some raiding more settled lands, or fighting over water holes 3 or sometimes, perhaps, caught like exhausted animals and made to do their captor’s will, or, in the desperation of hunger, bartering control over their lives for bread and seed, as described on some fifteenth-century B.C. tablets unearthed at Nuzi, as well as in Genesis 47:18-26. Some perhaps were still trying to follow inadequate bicameral voices, or clinging to the edge of settled land, fearing to launch out, becoming breeders of sheep and camels, while others, having struggled unsuccessfully to mingle with more settled peoples, then pushed out into the open desert where only the ruthless survive, perhaps in precarious pursuit of some hallucinated vision, some back parts of a god, some new city or promised land.
To the established city-states, these refugees were the desperate outcasts of the desert wilderness. The city people thought of them collectively as robbers and vagrants. And so they often were, either singly, as miserable homeless wretches stealing by night the grapes which the vine-dressers scorned to pick, or as whole tribes raiding the city peripheries for their cattle and produce, even as nomadic Bedouins occasionally do today. The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets.1 And khabiru softened in the desert air, becomes Hebrew.
The story or imagined story of the later Khabiru or Hebrews is told in what has come down to us as the Old Testament. The thesis to which we shall give our concern in this chapter is that this magnificent collection of history and harangue, of song, sermon, and story is in its grand overall contour the description of the loss of the bicameral mind, and its replacement by subjectivity over the first millennium B.C.
We are immediately, however, presented with an orthological problem of immense proportions. For much of the Old Testament, particularly the first books, so important to our thesis, are, as is well known, forgeries of the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries B.C., brilliant workings of brightly colored strands gathered from a scatter of places and periods.2 In Genesis, for example, the first and second chapters tell different creation stories; the story of the flood is a monotheistic rewrite of old Sumerian inscriptions;3 the story of Jacob may well date to before 1000 B.C., but that of Joseph, his supposed son, on the very next pages comes from at least 500 years later.4 It had all begun with the discovery of the manuscript of Deuteronomy in Jerusalem in 621 B.C. by King Josiah, after he ordered the temple cleaned and cleared of its remaining bicameral rites. And Khabiru history, like a nomad staggering into a huge inheritance, put on these rich clothes, some not its own, and belted it all together with some imaginative ancestry. It is thus a question whether the use of this variegated material as evidence for any theory of mind whatever is even permissible.
Amos and Ecclesiastes Compared
Let me first address such skeptics. As I have said, most of the books of the Old Testament were woven together from various sources from various centuries. But some of the books are considered pure in the sense of not being compilations, but being pretty much all of one piece, mostly what they say they are, and to these a thoroughly accurate date can be attached. If we confine ourselves for the moment to these books, and compare the oldest of them with the most recent, we have a fairly authentic comparison which should give us evidence one way or another. Among these pure books, the oldest is Amos, dating from the eighth century B.C., and the most recent is Ecclesiastes, from the second century B.C. They are both short books, and I hope that you will turn to them before reading on, that you may for yourself sense authentically this difference between an almost bicameral man and a subjective conscious man.
For this evidence is dramatically in agreement with the hypothesis. Amos is almost pure bicameral speech, heard by an illiterate desert herdsman, and dictated to a scribe. In Ecclesiastes, in contrast, god is rarely mentioned, let alone ever speaking to its educated author. And even these mentions are considered by some scholars to be later interpolations, to allow this magnificent writing into the canon.
In Amos there are no words for mind or think or feel or understand or anything similar whatever 3 Amos never ponders anything in his heart; he can’t; he would not know what it meant. In the few times he refers to himself, he is abrupt and informative without qualification; he is no prophet, but a mere “gatherer of sycamore fruit”; he does not consciously think before he speaks; in fact, he does not think as we do at all: his thought is done for him. He feels his bicameral voice about to speak and shushes those about him with a “Thus speaks the Lord! ” and follows with an angry forceful speech which he probably does not understand himself.
Ecclesiastes is the opposite on all these points. He ponders things as deep in the paraphrands of his hypostatic heart as is possible. And who but a very subjective man could say, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” (1:2), or say that he sees that wisdom excels folly (2:13). One has to have an analog ‘I’ surveying a mind-space to so see. And the famous third chapter, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven . . .” is precisely the spatialization of time, its spreading out in mind-space, so characteristic of consciousness as we saw in I.2. Ecclesiastes thinks, considers, is constantly comparing one thing and another, and making brilliant metaphors as he does so. Amos uses external divination, Ecclesiastes never. Amos is fiercely righteous, absolutely assured, nobly rude, speaking a blustering god-speech with the unconscious rhetoric of an Achilles or a Hammurabi. Ecclesiastes would be an excellent fireside friend, mellow, kindly, concerned, hesitant, surveying all of life in a way that would have been impossible for Amos.
These then are the extremes in the Old Testament. Similar comparisons can be made with other early and late books, or early and late parts of the same book, all revealing the same pattern, which is difficult to account for apart from the theory of the bicameral mind.