Continued...
"This is one of the great religious founding moments of the Judeo-Christian tradition: Abraham obeying Yahweh all the way, even past the limits of absurdity. But in the Bible narrative (Genesis 22:1-19), this great and profound act is conducted without any religious pomp, even secretively. He doesn’t tell his family he is going to obey Yahweh’s glorious command. He makes his son believe they are going for an ordinary animal slaughter, until Isaac himself notices that they have everything for a proper slaughter except an animal. He expressly tells his servants that he and his son will both come back soon. He knows his family will prevent him from obeying Yahweh’s command, and rightly so.
The narrative goes on to relate that Abraham is prevented from striking and killing his son. it says that an angel of the Lord intervened. If we discount the hypothesis that angels exist and intervene in human actions, we simply read that someone stopped him. Perhaps the voice (“Yahweh”) has changed its mind, and now tells him not to go all the way. It tells him that he has already passed the test of obedience, and resumes the older tune that he will be the ancestor of a numerous people. But more probably, it is the people in his surroundings who stop him, and the explanation that they have really been Yahwah’s agents ripens later in Abraham’s brain.
We may suppose that his family was kind enough not to start arguing when he gave his own paranoid explanations for his behaviour. In fact, it is not uncommon that the patient’s surroundings, after they have come to know the line of his delusion, start playing along. Perhaps, when Sarah gave her favours to the visitor, hoping he might get her pregnant after all, she and the other family members told Abraham, in consonance with the things he himself usually said, that this man was Yahweh, who had come to fulfill his promise. And when Abraham had been prevented by the servants from killing Isaac, they joined him in ascribing it to divine intervention. This way, a family tradition was started that interpreted the family saga in the terms of Abraham’s delusion. And because it was such an unusual story, it was preserved and came down to the time of the Bible’s codification, to become the well-known foundation narrative of prophetic monotheism.
In handing down the story, it is the unusual, not the ordinary, that gets most attention. That is why the faithful report of Abraham’s strange behaviour has reached us. It is also why any report of a normal religious man, who does his daily devotions but doesn’t pretend anything weird like being Yahweh’s chosen one, would never have become so well-known and influential (for better or for worse).
Readers who fear that we are going to declare all the prominent Bible characters madmen, need not worry. The next two patriarchs, Isaac and Jacob, were not crazy at all. There are some interesting non-pathological psychological aspects to their adventures, but we will not go into that here. It will suffice to remark that Jacob was a very sly and unscrupulous man. He and his sons shared an amazing harshness and lack of fellow-feeling. But in this world, that may be an advantage: Jacob, also called Israel, is one of the few people (next to Bolivar, Columbus, and Bharata) who have a country named after them. When his sons went to Egypt, they remembered Kanaan as “the land of Israel” (in Hebrew: Eretz Ishrael). This expression was later understood as “the land Israel”, so that Jacob’s new name got eternalized as the name of the land which is also known, after the inhabitants from whom the Israelites wrested it, as Kanaan or Philistine/Palestine.
2.4. Moses
The Bible report about Moses is spread over no less than four Bible books: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. In these books, exegetes distinguish four layers. The first is the Yahwist tradition, written in the time of Israel’s kings, in the early first millennium BC, and in which “Yahweh” is consistently used as God’s name. The second is the Elohist tradition, written in the time of the great prophets, and in which “Elohim” is used as God’s name. The third is the Priestly tradition, from the time of the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC, and immediately after. The fourth is the Deuteronomist tradition, the codification of the “Mosaic” law, which was largely created in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, and attributed to Moses for the sake of sanctity. So, the original narrative has gone through many hands, and the historical Moses lies buried under many layers.
Yet, in tradition-oriented cultures, stories were often preserved in full detail for many centuries. Especially typical and unusual facts about people and their remarkable feats were accurately preserved. To test the reliability of the Moses narrative, we dispose of two types of criteria: external criteria, viz. some few possible references in Egyptian sources; and internal criteria. These latter comprise the coherence between the different stages in the story: is the Moses of the time before the Exodus depicted as having the same personality as the Moses of the wanderings in the desert? This is the so-called split-half reliability. The other important internal criterion is whether the narrative gives us an unambiguous and typical character description, or a mere collection of commonplaces and stereotypes. Moreover, does such a character description reveal negative traits which were certainly not concocted for glorifying the “founder of monotheism”, or perhaps even pathological traits which the writers couldn’t have thought up even if they had wanted to?
Moses in Egypt is depict d as a man of violent temper, who did not shy away from terrorism. When a Hebrew worker is whipped by an Egyptian officer, which was a rather common practice in those days, Moses goes as far as killing the Egyptian. If historical, the “tenth plague of Egypt”, the killing of the first-born son of every house, was clearly brought about by a terrorist campaign. Why else were the Hebrews ordered to make a sign on their doors? Surely God didn’t need such a sign to avoid killing the wrong people: but the terrorists did. The other plagues of Egypt (locusts, mosquitoes, hail storms, the colouring of the Nile water) were all natural phenomena, which Moses or the narrators may have played up as divine signs. Moses was a panic monger, who knew how to impress and fool the crowds. He was very cunning and even beat the court magicians at snake tricks. Considering the Biblical information on his court education, he may have been trained by one of the fabled magicians of Egypt, and had shown himself a gifted and creative pupil.
The Moses of the desert years is definitely the same impulsive man. According to Ex. 32:19-25, when he came down from Mount Sinai and saw the golden calf, he was enraged and destroyed the idol; he gathered a band of Levites and ordered them to go around the camp and make a slaughter; they killed 3000 people. Trespassers of Moses’ Law are punished with death, the one and only penalty Moses knows: “Someone who had cursed Yahweh’s name was stoned to death, as Yahweh had ordered Moses to do” (Lev. 24:23). A man who was caught in the act of chopping wood on a Sabbath day was brought before Moses, who ordered the people to stone him (Num. 15:32-36).
And Moses still played his magic tricks. Once when the people uttered their discontent, Yahweh sent snakes to bite the people (Num. 21:4-9): if we remember Moses’ dexterity with snakes displayed before the pharaoh, we can guess who was behind this act of Yahweh’s. Several times, Moses asserts his authority by invoking miracles from Yahweh. Thus, he plants his brother Aaron’s staff in the ground, and it starts to blossom (Num. 17:16-28). The most famous occasion is of course his stay on top of Mount Sinai, where he receives the Ten Commandments: the hilltop gets covered with a cloud of smoke, and mighty trumpet calls are heard. It was a simple kind of show, enough to impress the credulous people. Like any juggler, he never allowed people to peep behind the curtain: in Ex. 19:21-24, Yahweh orders Moses not to allow the people to come near the mountain, “for many would die”, and Moses assures Him that the mountain has been sealed off safely.
Like in Egypt, but on a far larger scale, he practised terrorism against other peoples who came in the way of his own people’s expansion. Yahweh ordered him to destroy the altars and sacred symbols of the peoples of Kanaan (Ex. 34:12-13). “Thus ye shall do unto them: ye shall strike down their altars, smash their sacred stones to pieces, fell their sacred trees and bum their idols. Nobody will resist you until ye have exterminated them” (Deut. 7:2-24). Indeed, Yahweh is not satisfied with idol-breaking, he wants skulls to be broken as well, many thousands of them: “[of the peoples who are remote neighbours] ye shall slaughter all the males. But in the cities that Yahweh puts in your possession, ye shall not let anyone survive” (Deut. 20:13-16). Perhaps killing the males and abducting the females can be somewhat excused as a common practice in every kind of war. But even by those standards, Yahweh goes too far when he orders all living beings killed.
Moses put these divine orders into practice. He flew into a rage when his men had killed all the adult males of the Midianite people (which, incidentally, had given Moses shelter years before, see Ex. 2:11-18) but had left the females and children alive. He had all the boys and non-virgin women also killed, but the virgins they could keep for their pleasure (Num. 31:7-18). After Moses’ death, his successor Joshua followed in his footsteps. The gruesome treatment of the 31 cities he conquered, is described in detail in Joshua 8-12: “He destroyed all the living beings in the city and did not let anyone escape” (10:28). Joshua merely carried out the commandments inherent in Moses’ deal with Yahweh.
In all this slaughter, Moses styled himself as merely the hand of Yahweh. It was not he but Yahweh who did the killing, as is clear from Deut. 19:1: “When Yahweh your God hath exterminated all the people of the land that He hath given you…” From the theological viewpoint, the importance of this is that he introduced the concept of Holy War, which in principle meant that God engaged in warfare for (actually also through) His people. From the viewpoint of the inquiry into the historicity of the Moses narrative, the importance is that Holy War talk is perfectly consistent with Moses’ style of action in Egypt (where he also portrayed the killing of the first-born Egyptians as God’s intervention).
It is remotely possible that this consistency (the split-half reliability) is due to a systematic imposing of this Holy War doctrine on the entire Moses narrative by the editors. The tirade against other gods and the repeated induction to kill apostates, in Deut.13, may be such a later priestly interpolation. Perhaps Moses was much too busy with actual warfare to carry out religious inquisition and purification campaigns, which was more a task for. the later scribes and prophets. But the Holy War doctrine is probably not a later addition, for it does fit the military situation well. Even if it were a later addition, this would only weaken but still not contradict the case for the historicity of Moses’ personality description as the Bible has preserved it.
External evidence has been claimed to exist, confirming Moses’ historicity and the essentials of his religious outlook.7 Egyptian sources give a lot of information on a character whose career is contemporary with and entirely similar to that of Moses: the Egyptian dignitary Beya. The name already points to the Semitic Yahwist tradition: Be-Yah means “on/by/in Yah”, as in “by Yah (I swear)” or “in Yah (I trust)”. He also had a long Egyptian name of which “moses” (child of) was a part, as was very common in Egyptian names. So, it is possible that Moshe/Moses was a Hebraized abbreviation of the Egyptian name of this Beya.
This dignitary Beya was a very powerful man at the Egyptian court, and several depictions of him have been preserved. It is striking that he apparently refused to be depicted as bowing before any of the Egyptian gods. He disappears from the Egyptian sources after the unsuccessful palace revolution of the regent princess Tausret against the legitimate young king Siptah. Probably he was part of the conspiracy, and had to flee after its failure. As he is called “the Syrian” in one source, he may have joined hands with the numerous Semitic immigrant community (which may have been held guilty, rightly or wrongly, for the political trouble, just like the Hyksos earlier), and led it into exodus.
Without using those sources, and merely relying on the (not obviously interpolated) data in the Bible narrative, dr. Somers claims to discern some not exactly pathological but still rather extreme traits in Moses. Thus, the “burning bush” need not be understood as a hallucination, but can be explained by natural causes: certain plants in the desert secrete etheric oils which can inflame spontaneously under the sun’s heat. This might have made a big impression on someone not familiar with it, and the desert heat may have helped in making Moses sense a divine presence.
Moses may have suffered from what is called a “reactive psychosis”, caused by guilt feelings about the murder of an Egyptian in anger against his punishing a Hebrew slave (or about other, unrecorded crimes). That is also the line followed by Freud in his analysis of Moses. What sometimes happens in such cases, is that a murderer afterwards develops the conviction that God had wanted this murder, that it was God’s will overruling human morality, so that the murder was justified. This would then have led to Moses’ remarkable and self-righteous proneness to murder, terror and the death penalty.
Dr. Somers rejects the thesis put forward by Hirsch that Moses suffered from paranoia. Contrary to the objections of some religious people, the psychological interpretation of the Bible narrative is not an arbitrary projection of modem prejudices, with “paranoia” as a catch-all for everything that does not live up to our standards of irreligious conventionalism. It is a precise scientific analysis, in which a precise syndrome has to be discerned and checked against all the reliable data in the narrative.
Of course, not everyone who has committed a crime develops this same psychosis. A certain temperamental disposition should be present. Psychology knows of a specific condition called the ixoid (= viscous, sticky) personality, with these characteristics:
domineering and vindictive behaviour;
impulsive, inclined to violence;
intolerant of disagreement;
waves of bad temper, explosions;
yet, over-social, wants to serve, has a sense of fairness (so that their angry explosions are occasioned by perceived injustice);
meticulous, order-loving, pedantic;
persistent and tough;
speech disturbances may occur (certain similarity, on a less physical level, with epilepsy).
While this syndrome may perhaps lack in precision, so that a firm conclusion about its application to Moses may seem like overstretching the method a bit, it is correct that this “syndrome” is in evidence in Moses’ behaviour. It is indeed in reaction to a perceived injustice against the Hebrew labourer that Moses kills the Egyptian. And it is mentioned explicitly that he complains of not being a good speaker, so that Yahweh allows his brother Aaron to speak for him.
Since man makes God after his own image and likeness, it is legitimate to trace some of Moses’ personal character traits in the God-image which Moses has impressed upon scores of generations of Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheists. The sometimes morbid character of revealed monotheism is partly traceable to Moses’ personal psychological condition.
2.5. The great prophets
For some really pathological cases, we should read the stories of the prophets. Let us briefly relate dr. Somers’ diagnosis of the greatest of them.
Of course, not all prophets were mentally disturbed people, many just practised a kind of clairvoyance but remained balanced people, some even with a healthy critical intellect. Others are fanatics, but are not described as personalities which we would now recognize as mentally disturbed.
The prophet Elijah was not at all crazy, just clever. When he engages in a competition with the Baal priests, the poor fellows try to get a fire burning on their alter by singing invocations of Baal, while he has sprinkled “water” on his altar and claims the honour for Yahweh once it catches fire (1 Kings 18:20-40). The story smacks of propaganda, but may nonetheless be a true report of a Yahwist prophet’s unscrupulous deceitfulness. The nature of the “water” sprinkled by Elijah becomes clear when we read of a similar feat in the book of the maccabees (2 Macc. 1:20): the Levites have to get fire in a cave, they only find drab water, they bring it nonetheless, and yes, it brings forth fire. A subsequent verse calls the water “nephtai”: petroleum was already known to some insiders, and priests used it as a trick to impress people. The Romans also used it, as is clear from the allegation by the writer of the Apocalypse (who appears not to have known the trick) that they had the power to “make fire come down from heaven” (Ap.13:13).
After this episode, Elijah also manages to do what other prophets only rant about and promise to make Yahweh do: some large-scale killing. After cunningly assembling them, he has hundreds of Baal priests massacred. On the whole, Elijah too believed he had a private telephone line with God, but he had retained a firm grip on social and strategic realities, and acquired a much more honourable positions than some of his colleagues.
For a more tragic example, we turn to Isaiah, the “man of sorrow”. He had a schizophreniform accident, a vision with schizophrenic contents, which deeply influenced his further thought, but did not form a chronic condition of schizophrenia. In this vision, he has sensory hallucinations, catastrophic revelations, and a strong delusion of being chosen by God to serve a mission. This will condition his self-image and his “prophetic” style of logorrhea, emotional exaggeration, and making predictions.
Taking into account that some of Isaiah’s successful “predictions” are in fact later interpolations, we find that the remaining authentic predictions are little more than expressions of the prophet’s own vengefulness and wishful thinking. Liberation theologians get a kick out of Isaiah’s tirades against the mighty and the successful (who will be wiped away when the Lord cometh), thinking that he was a kind of social revolutionary; in fact, he was just another typical unhappy man who developed both an intense vengefulness against the successful and a, delusion of being special in a supernatural way. Unhappy and vengeful people are keen observers and critics of others’ faults. And who will believe that Isaiah’s walking barefoot and naked for three years (Is.12) is not abnormal behaviour but a deliberate sign of warning?
Isaiah’s hymn on the newborn son (“For a child is born unto us, a son is given…”, 9:5-6), interpreted as referring to Christ by Christians and probably by Christ himself, is more realistically about the prince Manasse, born in 699 BC. Of course, some of the imagery in Isaiah is of great and lasting beauty (especially when put to music by Haendel in his Messiah), in spite of the morbid element in the prophet. We should realize that the man, and more so his final editors, integrated his delusion into a genuine religious vision. A mere copy of his authentic tirades and “predictions” would not have enthused many followers, but a suitably enlarged and edited version endowed with a literate religious doctrine and style became genuinely powerful.
Jeremiah, the prophet of doom par excellence, is a clear case of paranoia querulans. Israel has fallen and will be punished. The king of Babylon who subdues Israel is merely God’s punishing arm; which will not save him, the idolater, from equally being punished in the end. Jeremiah is against everyone, including rivalling godmen and prophets, and God’s revenge will be total. His immense hatred for everyone who disagrees and his hammering on always the same allegations and promises of doom, and a secondary delusion of being persecuted, are typical signs of querulous paranoia.
As Dr. Somers writes: “The book Jeremiah teaches us nothing about God, it illustrates how a sick mind pictures God in terms of his own delusion… Jeremiah shows a characteristic trait of the paranoia patient: a deadly hatred against everyone who disagrees with him, a totally disproportionate reaction to the ‘other opinion’, inspired by hurt narcissism. The inflated ego is invested with divine dignity and power. Whoever speaks up against God, must die.” In a sense, this is a diagnosis of not only Jeremiah, but of prophethood itself.
Ezekiel, who lived in the Babylonian exile, reiterated the condemnation of unfaithful Jerusalem by his contemporary Jeremiah. But he is of a different psychological type: he is not aggressive towards his audience, rather he is indifferent. The evil has been done, the catastrophe is sure to follow, whether people listen or not. Ezekiel is an unmistakable case of schizophrenia. In the 22 years (592-570) covered by the book Ezekiel, we see a typical development of this condition: he gets hallucinatory visions, develops an increasingly bizarre behaviour, isolates himself. In moments of calm, he relates his visions to others and gives detailed descriptions.
Not every schizophrenia patient makes it to the status of prophethood. Ezekiel was not an extreme case, and he was a literate man who could somehow make his visions relevant through religion, which made them interesting for the Bible editors. It was also his initial deep religiosity that made him vulnerable to emotional collapse when Jerusalem fell, its temple usurped by Baal priests, and the people (at least, the elite) forced into exile in Babel. Unlike many fellow Hebrews, he could not adapt to this Pagan city full of opportunity, and his emotional collapse developed into a permanent mental affliction.
2.6. Henoch
The last Old Testament prophet we must mention in this brief survey, is Henoch. His book (mid-second century BC) is classed as apocryphal, but it is an integral part of the prophetic tradition. Henoch was a staunch pharisee8 and leader of the Essene sect. Probably he was the sect’s “teacher of righteousness”, mentioned in the so-called Death Sea Scrolls unearthed at Qumran. It is he who first applied the notion of the “Son of Man” (developed by Daniel as pertaining to the Israelite nation as a whole) to himself, which personalized notion Jesus in turn was to interpret as applying to himself. There can be no doubt that Jesus borrowed from Henoch: the New Testament contains 64 almost literal quotes from Henoch, plus other types of, references.
The book Henoch contains the writings of someone suffering from paranoid schizophrenia (with all the typical features of schizophrenia as Karl Jaspers described them).9 And it is these Henochian visions which constitute an essential component of the belief system of Jesus and his disciples.
Once more, it should not surprise us that someone with such an affliction could be the recognized leader of a sect. Among other factors, people with a distorted consciousness are often capable of feats of asceticism which require tremendous will-power in ordinary mortals. And the common people of those days would naturally associate the abnormal with the supernatural, especially if it came clothed in the language of religion. But remarkably, in the case of Henoch at least the guardians of the official religious tradition were suspicious of the divine character of Henoch’s book, mostly because of its very open self-centredness. The typical thing with all people suffering from delusions, is that these delusions are very self-centred and allot special importance to the sufferer. But in the case of Henoch, it was conspicuous even to not very discriminating people that Henoch was glorifying more himself than Yahweh.
Henoch claims that he had been given a divine job by God Himself, to reprimand the angels who, sometime before the Flood, had fallen in love with human females and begotten, on them the giants (remark the element of jealousy). Then, he is taken on a trip through heaven: “And I, Henoch, I alone have seen the vision, the end of everything, and no man will see the way I have seen” (19:3). In heaven, he sees someone called the “Head of Days”, who comes to him and says: “You, you are the Son of Man, who was born for righteousness and righteousness remains with you and the righteousness of the Head of Days will not abandon you” (71:17). In a vision of a terrible Day of Judgment, he refers to himself as the Chosen One.
The concept of the “Son of Man” had already been introduced in the book of Daniel, written at most a few decades earlier. But there, it explicitly refers to the Chosen People, the nation of Israel which will inherit the rule over the earth after four successive great empires have gone down. But Henoch and later Jesus mistakenly identify the “Son of Man” with their own individual selves.
The common trait in “prophets” is that they give themselves a very central place in history. Being the spokesman of the omnipresent Creator is not a very modest claim. it belongs to the realm of psychopathology.
2.7. The first century
The next important god-sent is none other than Jesus, whose case will be presented in the ch.3. He lived in an age when prophets or at least messianic and millennarist characters flourished. One of his younger contemporaries was the real founder of Christianity, Saint Paul, who taught and believed that the Second Coming of Christ, inaugurating the final days of the world before the judgment, was just around the corner.
The big turn in Paul’s life came when, on the road to Damascus, he fell from his horse and had an experience which he later understood as Jesus calling him. But this experience was completely different in nature from the prophetic revelations and conversations with God which we have mentioned above (except for Moses’ awe before the burning bush, which is a close parallel). The event on the road to Damascus, which triggered Paul’s conversion, was not a crisis in a developing mental disease, but a simple and typical sunstroke. Paul (then still called Saul) hears a voice but doesn’t recognize the speaker: this confusion is the opposite of the intense clarity typical of a hallucination.
Paul suffers a natural blindness for a few days, and under the care of a Christian convert, he gets well again. His inner stress because of his frustrated desire for perfection in the observance of the Law, and more acutely his guilt about the killing of Stephanus, the first Christian martyr, would invest this otherwise ordinary breakdown with a religious significance that was to have world-wide and millennia-long consequences.
Paul’s sect was just one among a number of first-century Jewish sects who expected the end of the world, the coming of the messiah, or a similar cosmic event.
The Apocalypse of Baruch is a prophecy of the impending struggle for Jerusalem, written in the revolutionary fervour of ca. 68 AD. It has remained apocryphal, either because the Jews saw too much inspiration from the Christian Apocalypse in it, or because its predictions had failed in a much too obvious and much too dramatic way. Indeed, it had predicted that the Romans would not be able to take the Temple Mount or to bum down Jerusalem. It is because the text was not canonized that its failed prediction survives in cold print. By contrast, Mark’s Gospel, edited just after the fall of Jerusalem, has the correct “prediction” that of the Temple of Jerusalem, “not one stone will be left upon the other” (13:2).
Baruch’s Apocalypse is not at all the product of visions and hallucinations, but an intellectual construction modelled on the extant prophetic literature, adding some newer literary techniques such as the Socratic dialogue. It constructs imagery to evoke the shocking developments of the final days, before Jerusalem shall defeat her enemies and reign in glory. While we will not further deal with it here, we note that the book is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it is a kind of missing link between Judaism and fledgling Christianity, at a time when both were expecting the ultimate catastrophe and glorification. Secondly, it illustrates how sane and intelligent people subscribing to an established belief system can integrate the prophetic outlook in their worldview. The entire edifices of Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology are similar intellectual elaborations of a basic literary material with an important irrational “visionary” component.
The last Jewish prophet was called Ezra. In ca. 100 AD, he wrote a book relating a dialogue with an angel, who is asked why God could let the recent catastrophes happen to his chosen people, and what He has in store for them now. The visions described are very coherent, are followed by an explanation, and give systematic answers to the questions which Jews are asking. Short, it is an intellectual construction, not the report of real “prophetic visions”. It is not the result of pathological experiences, but merely a kind of theological manifesto.
The apocryphal book of Ezra contributed to the enduring revolutionary fervour among Jewish die-hards. It employs images from the earlier apocalyptic literature including the Christian Apocalypse, and in more cautious wording it retains essentially the same message: God has not abandoned His people, He has been testing them, and the final crisis is approaching. In some details, its predictions were even enacted in the last Jewish insurrection, that of the self-styled Messiah Bar Kochba in 132-135. Ezra had predicted (13:9-10) that the saviour will have a flaming mouth, and so Bar Kochba took burning hay in his mouth to prove his credentials.
With the collective suicide of the last Jewish insurrectionists in Masada, the period of Messianic expectation came to an end. Reality had outlasted and defeated all the prophetic Doomsday scenarios. By that time, the Christian sect had already accepted that Jesus’ second coming was not around the corner after all. For Doomsday prophets, the glorious days were over." |
