Early Israel : cultic praxis, god, and the Sôd hypothesis / Alex S. Kohav.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kohav, Alex S., 1948- author.

Series:

Routledge Jewish studies series.

Routledge Jewish studies series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bible. Pentateuch.

Bible.

Bible. Pentateuch--Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (417 pages)

Place of Publication:

London ; New York, New York : Routledge, [2023]

Summary:

Early Israel offers the most sweeping reinterpretation of the Pentateuch since the nineteenth-century Documentary Hypothesis. Engaging a dozen-plus modern academic disciplines--from anthropology, biblical studies, Egyptology and semiotics, to linguistics, cognitive poetics and consciousness studies; from religious studies, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis and literary criticism, to mysticism studies, cognitive psychology, phenomenology and philosophy of mind--it wrests from the Pentateuch an outline of the heretofore undiscovered ancient Israelite mystical-initiatory tradition of the First Temple priests. The book effectively launches a new research area: Pentateuchal esoteric mysticism, akin to a "center" or "organizing principle" discussed in biblical theology. The recovered priestly system is discordant vis-à-vis the much-later rabbinical project. This volume appeals to a diverse academic community, from Biblical and Jewish studies to literary studies, religious studies, anthropology, and consciousness studies.

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Series Information

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Preface: The Pretext

Prologue: The Subtext - When Israel Was Young

Introduction: The Text: Israel's Unparalleled Communication Across Millennia

Gatekeepers of Jewish Ancestral Tradition

"Fiction of Actuality": Literally True-or Fictionally True?

Of Higher-Scalar Effects

How Many Jewish Mysticisms?

Interrogation of All Possible Interrogations, the Interrogation of God: Are Humans Capable of Literature?

Notes

Part One The Context

1 The God of Moses Versus the "One and All" of Egypt: From the Magic of Hypostatized Spirituality (Egypt) to the …

The Enigma of Ancient Israel

Hieroglyphic Images as a Target of the Second Commandment

"Holistic" Pictorial Communication Versus Alphabet-Based Sequential Verbal Narration

Magical Consciousness and Cosmotheism: The God of Moses Versus the "One and All" of Egypt

A Semiotic Perspective: Iconicity and Symbolism (Egypt) Versus Indexicality and Allegorization (Israel)

2 At the Primal Scene of Communication: The Question of Israel's Esoteric Referent

Of Primal Scenes

Staging a Scene

Five Scenes, All Up On the Edenic Stage

Scenes of Writing, Instruction, and Interpretation, Juxtaposed

The Scene of Origins, Or Historical/Literal Truth

At the Scene of Communication

The Literal-Fantastic Versus the Figurative-Logical

A Feeling of Wrongness

Is There a Literal Reference for a Figurative Expression?

The Literal/Nonliteral Divide and the Question of Literary Competence

"Trajectories Not Previously Entertained in the History of the System"

3 On the Notion of the Sôd: YHWH's Garden Versus the Rabbinical Orchard

The Unaccounted-For Mystery of Ancient Israelite Religion.

Rabbinical PaRDeS, an Orchard of the Uninitiated

Dual-Channel Narration: Fixedness Versus Violations and Shifts in Unconscious Contexts

Unthinkable Power and Cooperative Communication

Part Two The Metatext

4 Tracking the Sôd Through Emergence of a Complex System: Accessing the Torah's Veiled Axis of Communication

Can a Meta-Account Approximate Initiation?

Eschewing Reduction and Choosing Emergence

Epistemological Blockage, Delayed Response, Delayed and Deferred Categorization

Intention and Agency Apropos the Sôd: Authorial Action Versus Sentiency of the Reader

Utterance Interpretation: Epistemic Asymmetry of Speaker and Hearer

Presentation Versus Representation: Between the Warm Flesh of the Literal Event and the Cold Skin of the Concept

Concealed Axis of Communication and Its Traces: A Metachronic Approach

5 The Sôd as Poiesis: Probing the Sôd's Poietic-Tropological Structure and Multiscalar Power Dynamics

Positioning the Sôd Within the Pentateuch

The Sôd's Three Continuums

Hyletic-Noetic-Noematic Perspectives

The Sôd as a Poiesis: Poetic Function in Its Role as the Message

Expressing Things By Indirection

The Telltale Word From the "System"

The Sacred as a Cognitive Boundary: On the Allegoricity of the Pentateuchal Mimesis

Anttonen's Theory of the Sacred as a Cognitive Boundary

The Esoteric Source Domain of the Pentateuchal Text

Principal Characteristics of the Sôd's Poietic-Tropological Structuring: Select Literary Stratagems

Multiscalar Allegorical-Parabolic Projection

Indirect Indexicality

Markedness as a Crucial Scheme

Asymmetric Noetic Parallelism

6 A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch: Israel's Universe of Discourse

a Replica of the Torah.

Acquiring an Apposite …

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch

Jakobson's Model of Literary Communication (Continued)

A Husserlian Reading of the Pentateuch (Continued)

The Question of Grounds

The S-Code, the S-Addressee, the Addresser, the S-Context

Components of the S-Code: Semantic Fields

The Addressee of the Sôd

The Addresser: Pentateuchal Authors

Rethinking Context and the Referential Function

"Footprints" of the Sôd: Deictic Inferentiality, Connotational "Conferentiality," and Denotational "Deferentiality"

Deixis as Access

Referential Function (Continued)

Research Methodology Framework: "Pointers," "Locators," and "Identifiers" of the Sôd

Discourse Deictics

Traces of a Disguised Deictic Center

De Dicto: Setting-Indicative Pointers as Indexical Coordinates of the Noetic-Inferential Continuum

De Re: "Content-Communicative Locators" as Symbolic Coordinates of the Noematic-Conferential Continuum

De Re: "Metacommunicative Object Identifiers" as Iconic Coordinates of the Hyletic-Deferential Continuum

Part Three The Urtext

7 The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier: Retrieving the Torah Within the Scripture

The Study's Research Questions

Primary Question: Is There a Deliberately Concealed Alternative Narrative in the Pentateuch?

Secondary Question: Does the Conjectured Concealed Stratum Concern a Mystical Initiation System?

Selecting the Research Method

Survey of Available Textual Research Methods

Research Method Selected: Customized Noetic-Literary Textual Analysis

Assumptions and Limitations

The Study's Assumptions

The Study's Limitations

The Pentateuchal Noesis as the Study's Data

The Who[SETTING]

The Whereto[SETTING] and the Why[SETTING]

The What[SETTING]

The How[SETTING]

The Where[SETTING]

The When[SETTING]

Notes.

8 Israel's Noematic Signified: Reverse-Engineering the Pentateuchal Deific Numinous

Recovery of the Sôd's Noematic Signified: Emergence of Pentateuchal "Content and Meaning Given in the Act"

Overview of the Sôd's Noetic Signifier

The Why[TOPIC] and the Whereto[TOPIC]

The Logic of a Means of Access to a Supramundane Entity

The What[TOPIC] and the Who[TOPIC]

The Where[TOPIC]

The Body of a Would-Be Initiate

The When[TOPIC] and the How[TOPIC]

9 The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel: Recovering the Esoteric Referent of Ancient Israelite Initiatory Praxis

The What[OBJECT]

Excursus: Deconstructing Belî Mah

The How[OBJECT]

The Where[OBJECT]

Seven Etheric Knots of the Body

The Image of Elohim

The Why[OBJECT], the Whereto[OBJECT], and the Who[OBJECT]

The When[OBJECT]

Part Four The Code-Text

10 Externalizing Israel's Ineffable: Complex Tropological Entextualization Strategies for the Pentateuchal Numinous

The Code-Text: Figuration Set Free and Reassembled as Tropological Paradise

The Question of Israel's Ineffable

Why Is Figuration Invisible in the Pentateuchal Text?

Narratives (Plots) as Series of States of Consciousness in Conflict: Source Domain of Key Pentateuchal Narratives

Characters and Locations as Series of Asymmetric Noetic Parallelisms

Space (Locations) as the Setting for a Series of Scenes of Numinous Experiences

Time Intervals as Successive Expansions of the Initiate's Self-Consciousness

Oscillating Metalepses of Colliding Narratives

11 In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis: The Conundrum of the Eleventh Commandment, Eden's Theater of Ruptured Doxa and …

The Perils of a Restrictive Concept of Experience

The Meaning of Priestly Praxis

Slippages Between Systems and the Phenomenal Realm.

Bypassing Intellects, the Senses, and (Even) Language

World of Symbolization: The Veil of Maya

Bio-physiology of Understanding and Meaning: States of Consciousness, Shifts in Attention and Noticing

The Ineffable World

Superconsciousness: The World of the Hyperrational and Suprasensory

Human Being, "Liberated in This Life"

Wilfred Bion's "O" and Rappaport On Lies and Alternatives

The Experience of Being (Being-Itself)

Ultimate Sacred Postulates

The Eleventh Commandment

Analyzing God's Epistemic Diktat

Edenic Narrative's Three Paradoxical Paradigms

The Grand Edenic Megaphor: A Reenactment

Rupturing the Doxa, Fracturing the Epistêmê, and Going Beyond Intuition

Postscript: The HORS-TEXTE: Are We Greeks? Are We Jews? Fast-Forward to Today

Earning the Right of Closure: Does the Recovered Sôd Stratum Represent Closure for the Text of the Pentateuch?

Open Access to Information Versus Limits and Liminality

Are We Greeks? Are We Jews? But Who Are We?

The Study's Implications

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781003143932

1003143938

9781000777383

1000777383

OCLC:

1347364857