Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

53. Brandon, Op. cit., page 79.

54. Nephesh never means the soul of the dead and is not contrasted with the body. The Israelites had a word, ruach, usually translated as ‘spirit’, but it could as easily mean ‘charisma’. It denoted the physical and psychical energy of remarkable people, like Elijah. Bremmer, Op. cit., page 8.

55. Ibid., pages 8–9.

56. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, London: Routledge, 1953, page 2. For a more sociological version of this theory, see Robert Bellah’s article, ‘Religious evolution’, reprinted in his Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1970/1991.

57. Grant Allen, The Evolution of the Idea of God, London: Grant Richards, 1904, page 180.

58. Cyrus H. Gordon and Gary A. Rendsburg, The Bible in the Ancient Near East, New York: Norton, 1997, pages 109–113.

59. Allen, Op. cit., page 181.

60. Ibid., page 182.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., page 184.

63. Ibid., pages 185–186. See John Murphy, The Origins and History of Religions, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949, pages 176ff, for other early Hebrew traditions.

64. Menhirs and dolmens, though perhaps not as impressive as in western Europe, are still found all across ancient Phoenicia, Canaan, modern-day Galilee and Syria (Herodotus described a stela he saw in Syria that was decorated with female pudenda). Allen, Op. cit., pages 186–187.

65. Ibid., page 190.

66. Ibid., page 192.

67. ‘If Israel obeys Yahweh,’ says the Deuteronomist, ‘Yahweh will make thee plenteous for good in the fruit of thy belly, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground,’ but if Israel ‘ignores the jealous god, then “cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep”.’ Allen, Op. cit., page 194. Finally, in this context of Yahweh as a god of fertility, there is his demand that the first-born be offered as a sacrifice. In the pagan world the first child was often understood to be the offspring of a god ‘who had impregnated the mother in an act of droit de seigneur’. Karen Armstrong, A History of God, London: Vintage, 1999, page 26.

68. Allen, Op. cit., page 212.

69. Ibid., page 213.

70. Ibid., page 215.

71. Ibid., pages 216–217.

72. Ibid., page 219. See Bouquet, Op. cit., chapter 6, ‘The golden age of religious creativity’, pages 95–111. Kerkes, Op. cit., page 32.

73. Allen, Op. cit., page 22 for the forgery of Deuteronomy.

74. Bruce Vawter, The Conscience of Israel, London: Sheed & Ward, 1961, page 15.

75. Ibid., page 18.

76. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987, page 38. See also Norman Podhoretz, The Prophets, New York: The Free Press, 2002, page 92.

77. The phenomenon broke out at the time of the Philistine wars, and this links the prophets with the Nazirites, who indulged in ecstatic dances and other physical movements repeated so often that they finally succumbed to a kind of hypnotic suggestion, under the influence of which they would remain unconscious for hours. Vawter, Op. cit., pages 22–23. Ecstaticism had burned itself out by the time that the great moral prophets of the eighth century made their appearance. The Israelites had shared with neighbouring tribes the practice of divination, such as auguring with animal livers, but that too had fallen into disuse. Ibid., pages 24 and 31.

78. Ibid., pages 39–40.

79. Johnson, Op. cit., pages 36–38. The prophets, incidentally, opposed images of God, because this deprived the king of the day of appropriating such images to himself – and the ‘divinity’ and power that went with it – and because an ‘invisible’, interior god, helped their vision, driving men and women back on themselves as moral agents. Ibid., page 124.

80. Vawter, Op. cit., page 66. See also: Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, New York: The Free Press, 2001, pages 172–173.

81. Vawter, Op. cit., page 82.

82. Ibid., page 95; Podhoretz, Op. cit., pages 119f.

83. Vawter, Op. cit., page 111.

84. Ibid., page 72.