The Minds of the Bible:
Speculations on the Cultural Evolution of Human Consciousness
NEW! EXPANDED SOFTCOVER EDITION!
NOW INCLUDING A 28 PAGE LECTURE BY RABBI COHN.
A highly readable and fascinating look at the Old Testament from the perspective of Julian Jaynes’s theory, from Biblical scholar Rabbi James Cohn.
Two developments in the history of the Bible are deeply related, and not merely coincidental. One is the lamentation of the loss of the experience of hearing God’s voice. The other is the rise of the language of introspection: an interiorized subjective dialogue with oneself.
In our own time, we are acculturated from infancy on, to understand our mental life as a narratized interior mind-space in which we introspect in a ceaseless conversation with “ourselves.” Our ancestors, however, were acculturated to understand their mental life in terms of obedient responses to auditory prompts, which they projected outwards as the external voice of God. Although these “bicameral” people could think and act, they had no awareness of choices or of choosing — or of awareness itself.
Julian Jaynes proposed that as recently as 3,000 years ago, human beings were non-introspective. Jaynes claimed that one could trace this cultural transformation over the course of a scant millennium by analyzing the literature of the Hebrew Scriptures (“Old Testament,” OT). This book tests Jaynes’s assertions by examining the OT text in Hebrew, as seen through the lens of the Documentary Hypothesis and modern critical historical scholarship.
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