A Jaynesian Philology: The Bible as a Written Record of the Dawn of Consciousness
James Cohn, Invited address at The Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies, Charleston, WV, June 2013.
Abstract: In 1976, Julian Jaynes hypothesized that our ancestors were acculturated to understand their mental life in terms of obedient responses to auditory prompts, which they hallucinated 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. 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). Jaynes himself, however, was not skilled in Hebrew or cognate languages, and was forced to rely on translations and secondary sources. This presentation tests Jaynes’s assertions by examining passages from the OT text, as seen through the lens of the Documentary Hypothesis and modern critical historical scholarship. The writers of the oldest texts had no words in their cultural lexicon to correspond to our words such as “mind” or “imagination” or “belief.” Translations into English that employ such mentalistic words are misleading. By sharp contrast, in the later OT texts, a lexicon of rich interiority appears. The writers have become acculturated to experience mental life as a rich introspective consciousness, full of internal mind-talk and “narratization,” and perceiving their own actions as the result, not of obedience to an external voice, but of self-authorized, internal decisions. This presentation explores the relationship of introspective consciousness and language; the disappearance of prophetic voices in biblical literature over a specific time frame; the question of when and why a theory of mind arose in human development; and the appearance of vestiges of earlier mentalities in modern mental life.
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James Cohn – A Jaynesian Philology: The Bible as a Written Record of the Dawn of Consciousness
Re: James Cohn – A Jaynesian Philology: The Bible as a Written Record of the Dawn of Consciousness
Cohn's Babel Translation and Languages:
I was just reading through the Bible story of Noah and then on to Babel. I noticed that immediately preceding the story of Babel, which opens with "Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words." (Genesis 11:1) is preceded with a chapter on the descendants of Noah. Each summary of the descendants is closed out with a line describing that group as being, for example, "sons of Ham, according to their families, according to their languages, by their lands, by their nations." (Genesis 10:20)
From a bunch of different nations to "the whole earth used the same language" caught me off guard.
Is there any indication from Rabbi Cohn as to why this seemingly sudden shift occurs? Or is this further evidence, when translated correctly, showing a difference between each individual language as opposed to a universal voice?
I was just reading through the Bible story of Noah and then on to Babel. I noticed that immediately preceding the story of Babel, which opens with "Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words." (Genesis 11:1) is preceded with a chapter on the descendants of Noah. Each summary of the descendants is closed out with a line describing that group as being, for example, "sons of Ham, according to their families, according to their languages, by their lands, by their nations." (Genesis 10:20)
From a bunch of different nations to "the whole earth used the same language" caught me off guard.
Is there any indication from Rabbi Cohn as to why this seemingly sudden shift occurs? Or is this further evidence, when translated correctly, showing a difference between each individual language as opposed to a universal voice?