The Bible as a Written Record of the Dawn of Consciousness
Rabbi James Cohn interviewed by Brendan Leahy, in Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes Society, 2022).
Summary: Rabbi James Cohn interviewed by Brendan Leahy on the third hypothesis of Julian Jaynes’s theory: dating the transition from bicameral mentality to consciousness. With discussion of the Bible as a written record of the dawn of consciousness and the problems inherent in dating and translating ancient texts.
Excerpt: Brendan Leahy: I’m curious to hear how you came across Julian Jaynes’s theory and how your understanding has shifted, like you said it percolated over the course of — I don’t know how long?
James Cohn: I first read Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in 1982. At that time I was out of Rabbinical school. I had been serving as a Rabbi, pulpit Rabbi as I am now, and I was intrigued by his juxtaposition of two events chronicled in human literature. One of them is well known, and that’s the disappearance of the experience of encountering God in sight and sound as a completely external being apprehended through vision and hearing. The early books of the Bible rely strongly on an immediate direct experience of God through sound and sight, principally through sound. That tends to fade as one moves through the books of the Bible from the deep past until the more recent past. …