Review: “The Making of the Tabernacle and the Construction of Priestly Hegemony” by Nathan MacDonald

Nathan MacDonald. The Making of the Tabernacle and the Construction of Priestly Hegemony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.

In The Making of the Tabernacle and the Construction of Priestly Hegemony, Nathan MacDonald examines how the Pentateuch, especially the Priestly material, evinces a social hierarchy. In particular, he shows how different textual layers and connections evince that scribes carefully negotiated priestly power and authority through key Pentateuchal portions. He opens the introduction with his driving question: “How did the high priesthood go from being an important, but subordinate, office in the kingdom of Judah to being the principal source of authority” (1)? While scholars have sought to explain the priesthood development via other evidence in the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods, MacDonald argues such explanations are inadequate. So, he examines what he calls some of the most overlooked texts relevant to the priestly power: “the tabernacle and ordination accounts of Exod 25–31, 35–40 and Lev 8–10” (4). These texts are relevant because they reflect key developments during the Persian period and thus contribute “to our understanding of how ideological justification for the high priesthood’s supremacy developed” (4). As such, the book aims to explain why the priesthood had such supremacy in the early Hellenistic period.

In Chapter One, MacDonald examines four versions of the tabernacle account (Masoretic, Samaritan, Old Greek, and Old Latin). Through his examination, he identifies “complex textual problem[s]” (40). Subsequent chapters aim to explain these difficulties, especially how “the tabernacle’s architecture led to significant reshaping of the text” (40). In Chapter Two, MacDonald considers the textual history of the tabernacle account as recorded in the major textual traditions (Masoretic, Samaritan, Old Greek, and Old Latin): the Old Greek and Old Latin are the earlier versions and stem from a common ancestor in the Second Temple period; the Masoretic text shifts away from the Old Greek and Old Latin with a focus on “the sanctity of the sanctuary and its furniture” (65), alignment with instructions to Moses, and a standardized listing of items; the Samaritan text, being the latest, continues in a trajectory similar to the Masoretic text but with a focus on the Urim/Thummim and incense altar. Ultimately, though, DSS 4Q17 indicates that the tabernacle account was finished as early as the third century BCE. In Chapter Three, MacDonald carefully details the composition history of the tabernacle account in Exodus. As MacDonald observes, “the history of composition was rarely worked out in detail” (97). Although this review will not recount each of the nine steps MacDonald details, it is worth noting that each of these steps involves “the growth of the priestly literature” (98). More importantly for MacDonald, this growth “reveals shifting representations of the individuals and groups involved in the construction and rituals of the tabernacles” and “suggests a complex process of negotiation about the structure of the ideal theocratic society within Second Temple priestly circles” (98). On these grounds, namely, a detailed analysis of the tabernacle account’s textual history and the various tensions the analysis evinces, MacDonald concludes Part I and shifts to Part II in order to explore the competing social structures in more detail.

In Chapter 4, MacDonald argues that “the central focus of the original priestly writer,” the Grundschrift, “is on Aaron” (102). In the Grundschrift, the fabrication of Aaron’s vestments indexes with the materials of the tabernacle, thereby indicating that Aaron is made part of the sanctuary. To this end, Aaron represents the priesthood in a textual version wherein subordinate priests and Aaron’s sons were not participants. Similarly, the Grundschrift represents the emergence of people and priesthood as significant political entities” in the post-monarchic era. In Chapter 5, MacDonald examines “how the original priestly instructions for the tabernacle were harmonized with the instructions for the performance of the great atonement ritual in Lev 16” (151). This harmonization process involved new vestments and new furniture in sacred space. Such a division engendered a complex hierarchy between the high priest, priesthood, and ordinary Israelites. These revisions and literary developments, MacDonald argues, “elevate the priesthood’s status within Judaism” and “suggest some tentative steps towards appropriating some royal symbolism and prerogatives” by envisioning the high priest as achieving atonement and representing Israel (152). Chapter 6 wraps up Part II of the book by focusing on the craftsmen and community. Here, MacDonald attends to the hierarchy that Exodus 25–31 creates among the craftsmen and community, including, though not limited to, the master craftsmen (Bezalel and Oholiab), Israelite artisans, leaders, Levites, the Priesthood, Aaron, Moses, Israelite men, and Israelite women. In this literary world, Exodus provides “a justification for the prominence of the Second Temple and its priesthood” by showing how the hierarchy centers around the priesthood, even corralling “the royal tribe of Judah . . . into these efforts” (183).

Part III focuses on the recapitulation of the priestly ordination through the Priestly material in order to show how the textual history reflects social hierarchal developments. In particular, Part III considers how the ordination ritual transforms “from a one-day rite into a seven-day consecration ritual that concludes with an inauguration ritual on the eighth day” (212). In Chapter 7, MacDonald explores how the various priestly ordination rituals develop in such a way as to refine the hierarchical distinctions between the high priest and the priesthood. In particular, he examines Exodus 29, Leviticus 8, Leviticus 9, and Leviticus 16 and the complex interpretive interplay that engendered the text’s current form. Through this process, the ordination, consecration, and inauguration rituals forge a social hierarchy wherein the priesthood is indexed with the tabernacle, Aaron is anointed twice to signify social prestige, and the average person acts as an observer who brings gifts but is distinctly not a priest. In Chapter 8, MacDonald argues that Leviticus 9–10 is a compositional whole wherein, fitting with the theme of this monograph, the narrative affirms Aaron’s preeminence and superiority as a high priest over and against other priests. In Chapter 9, MacDonald considers how Numbers 7–10  and Exodus 24 are ordination rituals derived from the others. Numbers 7–10 comes “with a focus on the leaders and the Levites,” and Exodus 24 functions as a preface to the Sinai narrative, providing “an interpretive lens for the tabernacle account that follows in subsequent chapters” (240).

Through this volume, MacDonald walks through how the textual growth of the priestly material’s tabernacle account reflects attempts to construct narratives that rearticulate or reaffirm social hierarchies in distinct ways. Notably, his brief discussion of scribal illustrations in things like Codex Amiatinus indicates that others “rightly perceived priesthood, power, and writing [as being] tightly bound together” (274). MacDonald helpfully wraps up the monograph with a succinct statement that links his analyses of hierarchy in the tabernacle account and extant versions to the broader sociopolitical situation: “The original priestly document of the early Persian period created an ideal sanctuary in the desert safe from imperial aggression and human failure, by the end of the Persian period the extant versions of the Pentateuch portray an ideal community without an imperial governor and with the high priest at its apex. The conditions for the high priest’s assumption of coercive power were firmly established” (274).

My primary critique is that I would have liked to see a more thorough argument as to why MacDonald’s approach is more helpful than, for example, the approach Nathan Mastnjak advocates for in his recent Before the Scrolls. In Before the Scrolls, Mastnjak argues that by attending to biblical texts’ materiality and being aware of how the conceptual category of book history shapes our critical questions, we ought to “imagine a much looser assemblage of textual objects,” “a shelf . . . full of scrolls, sheets, and scraps” (Before the Scrolls, 224). In the context of MacDonald’s argument, this would shift the discussion away from “how to account for the differences” and potentially yield different results. For example, in Chapter 3, MacDonald observes, “It seems virtually certain that the account of the making of the bronze altar is late for it presupposed the story of Korah from Num 16–17, which is recognized as a very late element within the priestly material of Numbers” (89). By reframing this observation through Mastnjak’s lens, we might say instead that the story of Korah, while late within the priestly material of numbers, may still have existed as a separate scroll or scrap. As such, that an individual may have been familiar with the narrative without the narrative itself being in the particular textual collection is a distinct possibility. In this particular case, then, using Mastnjak’s approach suggests that the late appending of the bronze altar (on account that it presupposed the Korah narrative) could easily be flipped: the bronze altar was part of the Greek text and Old Latin, and scribes eventually added the narrative of Korah, which was floating around as a separate sheet and scrap. This sort of approach has the potential to challenge many of MacDonald’s claims.

Admittedly, this critique has three limitations. First, since MacDonald wrote this book, not me, I cannot articulate precisely how it might impact his arguments. That said, I suspect his overall argument could remain, albeit with additional nuance. Second, Mastnjak’s work was published around the same time as MacDonald’s work. So, this critique is less about MacDonald missing something in his analysis and is more about considering a potentially fruitful direction of study. Third, even MacDonald prefaces his book with a comment on the approach and model that he uses: “The model I propose is coordinated with contemporary models . . . . It is worth noting that a model is precisely that: a model. It is a sketch of developments that seeks to account for the extant evidence . . . . As I have argued elsewhere, literary-critical models are ‘good to think with.’ They seek to explain certain features of the text and focus attention on details that are easily overlooked in a synchronic reading. The end of such a model is not the model itself, or some putative original document, but understanding the extant forms of the text and the processes that led to them”(10–11).

Second, and this is more of an anecdotal note, MacDonald comments regarding Bezalel and Oholiab and Moses’s lack of a role: “Throughout the instruction, the reader of Exodus is justified in expecting that Moses will take the leading role in constructing the tabernacle [on account of the 2MS verbs]. Those expectations are dramatically overturned in Exod 31 when God informs Moses that he has called Bezalel and Oholiab. As I have demonstrated there can be little doubt that Bezalel and Oholiab’s involvement is a secondary development and that the tabernacle was originally presented as Moses’ achievement” (165–166, italics added for emphasis). Here, such a comment reflects a broader assumption about project management. As some folks may be aware, I work as a proposal writer and coordinator as a day job. In this role, I frequently help teams write proposals. Notably, these proposals typically come from a manager saying to a single person, “Submit a proposal for this opportunity.” Then, the team works on writing the proposal. Finally, the person to whom the manager communicated at the beginning of the process is ascribed as the author of the proposal. I highlight my experience to show that ascribing ownership of a project’s deliverable, in this case constructing the tabernacle, to an individual does not preclude others from supporting and sometimes even leading the effort.

Overall, MacDonald’s careful analyses offer a solid foundation for understanding the tabernacle account as reflecting hierarchical development at a literary level. As with anybody engaging in textual criticism, this volume and MacDonald’s arguments deserve further attention and engagement. As such, this monograph should be a foundational starting point for anybody exploring the tabernacle account or ordination narratives.

Review: “Religion as Make-Believe” by Neil Van Leeuwen

Neil van Leeuwen. Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023.

Neil Van Leeuwen’s scholarship centers around the philosophy of the mind, psychology, and cognitive sciences. Unsurprisingly, many of his previous publications (articles and chapters) centered around cognitive science as it relates to belief, imagination, and religion. As such, Religion as Make-Believe is a monograph that synthesizes ideas dispersed through his 31+ publications. In this sense alone, Van Leeuwen’s book is an achievement. Even so, with such a rich publication history (he seems to have taken the “Publish or perish” adage very seriously, and he clearly did not perish), scholars may be familiar with his previous work. Before I begin summarizing and reviewing, let me say this: I highly recommend reading Van Leeuwen’s Religion as Make-Believe even if you are already familiar with his previous publications. Indeed, some material might sound familiar, but his 2023 monograph brings together disparate threads into a single, coherent narrative.

Per typical reviews at The Biblical Review, I first provide a detailed summary, focusing not just on key points but also on capturing the flow and style of Religion as Make-Believe. Subsequently, I critique various aspects of his work and highlight avenues of research that others might consider pursuing based on his work.

Summary

In the prologue, Van Leeuwen details a parable to distinguish between religious credence and factual belief. Through the book, he articulates, details, and argues for the phenomena in this parable. This parable narrates how a group of kids “play make-believe on the playground” (1) and involves doll characters with powers, conflicts between those doll characters, an area of the playground designated “their special place to play” (2), character conflicts and events reflecting the kids’ conflicts and experiences, and narrative innovations. At this point, Van Leeuwen pauses to “highlight the cognitive features behind the children’s activities that constitute them (in part) as make-believe or pretending” (4):

1. Two-Map Cognitive Structure
   • “The first map guides the pretender’s movements in relation to represented physical features of the surrounding situation” (5); that is, kids must manipulate the dolls to speak for the dolls because dolls fundamentally cannot speak on their own.
   • “The second map represents the make-believe world” (5), namely, the storyline and superagent representations.
2. Nonconfusion
   • Even with the two-map cognitive structure, make-believe and pretending necessitate not confusing these two maps. Van Leeuwen highlights that most children do not confuse these maps; however, “the second map – the imagined one – also has emotional significance” (6). To this end, we are better off saying that pretenders responding to an aspect of the second map, the imaginary map, implies the “map is emotionally significant to the pretender (as opposed to ‘real to her’)” (7).
3. Continual Reality Tracking
   • This idea is that even when pretending, the pretender continually tracks reality so as to coordinate “the when and where of collective pretending” (8), a feature that is always at play. In Van Leeuwen’s parable, “the kids need to have mental representations that keep them aware of the mundane features of the ordinary world to interact with those features, even when one is using them to create make-believe” (8).

Van Leeuwen continues the parable. In this portion, he narrates how even after discontinuing this make-believe play in teenage years, the dolls become part of the kids’ lives again: after a divorce, one of the kids has a supernatural-like experience with one of the dolls that brings the kid a moment of peace; after discussion, the friends decide to meet on the playground again to play with the dolls; this results in new storylines with deeper meanings, significances, and principles within the imagined world. As adults, two group members marry and write The Book of Powers, which the married couple primarily writes and the other group members comment on. Their book results in a national movement, for which some groups were extremist and caused social problems. Finally, the married couple from the group, now old, continually ensure they always have a room for the doll characters as a reminder of the doll saying, “You are not alone.” (14).

Having framed the book via this parable, Van Leeuwen puts forward the central claim regarding psychological states called “beliefs” and “the relation between ‘beliefs’ (of various sorts) and imagination” (14). In particular, Van Leeuwen’s central argument is that “many religious beliefs are imaginings of the sort that guide make-believe play, though they are imaginings that become central to the religious actor’s identity and guide symbolic actions that express sacred values” (15).

Here, Van Leeuwen uses various sorts of beliefs – not a unified understanding of belief – to account for the different co-existing beliefs on different levels of the two-map cognitive structure. With this framework, Van Leeuwen suggests that this make-believe structure is at play in religion in two ways: 1) as the distinct attitude thesis, wherein “factual belief and religious credence both exist and are distinct cognitive attitudes; and 2) the imagination thesis, that “religious credence differs from factual belief in many of the same fundamental ways that fictional imagining does” (15). As such, Van Leeuwen explains that the book will show how imagining (make-believe) is akin to religious credence. Finally, Van Leeuwen notes that his work aims not to categorize all religious beliefs as religious credence but rather “to provide the expressive power to identify and explain important differences where differences exist” (17).

In Chapter One, Van Leeuwen sets the stage by exploring and articulating the differences between attitude and content. Such a distinction is key to thinking “about the attitude dimension of psychological states independently of other dimensions” (18). “Attitude” for Van Leeuwen is “a way of processing ideas,” and ideas constitute the content (18). Notably, attitude in this book is distinct from attitude in social psychology: whereas social psychology encompasses various components, this study uses attitude within cognitive studies to mean that an attitude exists “in relation to anything whatsoever that one thinks about” (20). This applies to both factual and imagined beliefs. Attitude breaks down further into cognitive and conative and enables choices and actions (discussed in Chapter Two).

With this context, Van Leeuwen returns to the playground parable and asks what the cognitive attitudes are for the two-map cognitive structure in the playground parable characters. He first responds by highlighting that the verb “believe” can encompass distinct cognitive attitudes toward the content. For example, “Jane believesthat John Madden is alive” (i.e., Jane factually believes because she missed the news) is a different cognitive attitude of belief than “Fred believes that Jesus Christ is alive” (i.e., Fred religiously creeds because he holds a “reverential, identity forming attitude toward the idea,” or the content [21]). Subsequently, Van Leeuwen returns to the two theses he explains in Chapter One: the distinct attitude thesis and the imagination thesis. He offers three methodological points based on his distinction of fictionally imagining and factually believing as well as religiously creeding and factually believing (wherein fictionally imagining is distinct from religiously creeding).

1. Religious credence and factual belief are cognitive attitudes, not about what is true or false, and are about the relation between content and reality. That is, cognitive attitudes are true or false in terms of alignment with reality.
2. Religious credence can have factual content, and factual belief can have religious content.
3. “We should think of [cognitive] attitudes as being clusters within a property space, where certain features systematically tend to go together, but not as a matter of necessity” (24).

All the preceding discussion is imperative because philosophers and cognitive scientists still miss the attitude-content distinction. Finally, since any content can be paired with any cognitive attitude, Van Leeuwen suggests anything can be sacralized”(27). As Van Leeuwen comments, “Just as one can play games of make-believe concerning any topic, so, too, can one play sacralized games of make-believe concerning any topic” (27).

In Chapter Two, Van Leeuwen describes his theory of cognitive attitudes. First, he points toward Hume, who asks about the difference between fiction and belief. This distinction, Van Leeuwen suggests, maps onto the cognitive attitudes detailed in Chapter One. Here, Van Leeuwen is not satisfied with Hume’s answer. So, this chapter addresses Hume’s question and introduces additional cognitive attitudes beyond factual belief and fictional imagining, which Van Leeuwen calls secondary cognitive attitudes.

Second, Van Leeuwen applies three desiderata (i.e., goalposts and standards) for an adequate theory about belief:

1. “A theory of belief or imagining (or any cognitive attitude) should say what distinguishes one cognitive attitude from the other” (29). For example, what distinguishes fictional imagining, factually believing, and hypothesizing?
2. “A theory of (factual) belief and other cognitive attitudes should unify philosophical and psychological research on those topics” (30).
3. “A theory of (factual) belief should help explain why people hold beliefs to more stringent norms of rationality than they do for other cognitive attitudes” (31).  

To this end, Van Leeuwen starts to explore factual beliefs as opposed to other degrees of belief (e.g., religious or hypothesized). Understanding factual beliefs, he suggests, can illuminate where other belief types “fall within the space of cognitive attitudes” (31). So, what exactly makes factual belief cognitively more than imagining? The Hume-Davidson theory fails to address this question because desire plus factual belief yields action just as much as desire plus imagining. Thus, the Hume-Davidson theory fails to address the first desideratum.

In order to fulfill this desideratum and characterize the “more” that factual belief constitutes, Van Leeuwen theorizes four aspects that explain how and why factual belief is more than imagining. These elements, which he details over the subsequent 25 pages, are as follows:

1. Involuntariness: if you factually believe it, you can’t help believing it.
2. No compartmentalization: factual beliefs guide action across the board.
3. Cognitive governance: factual beliefs guide inferences in imagination.
4. Evidential vulnerability: factual beliefs respond to evidence (32).

For the sake of space, I will not summarize all 25 pages of detail beyond this concise list, though they are worth exploring in full. Instead, I highlight the following noteworthy points.

1. By implication, these four items (when all active) mean a factual belief exists on the first of the two cognitive maps.
2. He nuances these four points overall in three ways:
   1. “Any person has a host of factual beliefs that satisfy all four principles” (34-35).
   1. “Any cognitive attitude that contrasts with factual beliefs on all four principles is not factual belief – rather, it’s a secondary cognitive attitude” (35).
   1. While these four principles “define the space of cognitive attitudes,” “some mental states may exist that satisfy some of the principles but not others since the principles are logically independent of one another” (35).
3. Involuntariness
   1. While factual belief and imagining both involve voluntary control, factual belief involves voluntariness “to a far lesser and severely limited degree” (36).
   1. “Factual beliefs, in combination with desires, form the basic level that structures volition” (39).
   1. Factual belief and imagining are asymmetrically related: “Factual beliefs help us choose what to imagine, but that’s not true vice versa, since factual beliefs aren’t chosen at all” (39).
4. No Compartmentalization
   1. Factual beliefs form the cognitive bedrock for imagining and thus cannot be compartmentalized into distinct episodes of imagining.
   1. The factual belief forms the first map, whereas the second map is where the secondary cognitive attitudes (e.g., imagining) are at play.
   1. These episodes that are compartmentalized include episodes with limited duration, signals to start and stop the episode, and an expectation of assigning “objects, places, and events . . . values other than what they are factually believed to be” (42).
   1. “Factual beliefs are active in representing the boundaries of the compartment” (44).
5. Cognitive Governance
   1. “Factual beliefs supply information for the imagination to use, and imaginings are informed by factual beliefs in this way” (47).
   1. Even imaginings depend on underlying factual beliefs (i.e., cognitive governance), such as the imagining that turning on an imaginary spigot assumes the factual belief that turning on a spigot results in flowing water.
   1. With Van Leeuwen’s two-map model, the second map (secondary cognitive attitude) imports elements from the first map (factual belief) but never vice versa.
   1. More broadly, factual beliefs govern all secondary cognitive attitudes, not just imagining.
6. Evidential Vulnerability
   1. People readily revise factual beliefs when new evidence arises.

All these elements at play simultaneously, Van Leeuwen argues, mean something is a factual belief and exists on the first cognitive map. When these elements are not all at play, the cognitive attitude is a secondary cognitive attitude, not a factual belief, and exists on the second map. Ultimately, “factual beliefs are . . . conditions for the possibility of having and using the other maps – the other cognitive attitudes” (62). All these items fit nicely with the elements he introduced in Chapter One and the prologue: “a two-map cognitive structure, nonconfusion, and continual reality tracking” (62).

In Chapter Three, Van Leeuwen begins to address one of his central questions: “What cognitive attitude or attitudes do religious ‘believers’ have toward their stories and doctrines about deities, demons, angels, dead ancestors, and other supernatural entities” (64)? First, he distinguishes between general and particular one-map theories and two-map theories, where the general theory relates to the broad idea and the practical theory is a more concrete claim. Importantly, Van Leeuwen recognizes that the one-map theory has value in some cases but suggests the two-map structure is more common (i.e., all things such as the supernatural as factual belief [one-map structure] vs. factual belief layered beneath religious credence [two-map structure]). Second, he demonstrates the theoretical value of the two-layer map by examining evidence from the Vineyard movement. He does so by showing that evidence from the Vineyard movement shows a clear distinction between the factual belief map (the first map) and the second map (secondary cognitive attitudes). He structures his argument for religious credence as distinct from factual belief by comparing the Vineyard movement’s “belief” with the four requirements for something to be factual belief.

On belief voluntariness, Van Leeuwen articulates four elements that show the Vineyard movement beliefs are rooted in factual beliefs as secondary cognitive attitudes: personal religious credences are “expressed as a matter of choice” (75), general religious credences involve choosing a specific church/religion, the idea of becoming Christian is framed as a choice, and “Vineyard members . . . deliberately (re)shape their internal descriptions of God to achieve therapeutic/self-help ends” (76). All these religious credences are informed by factual belief, the “cognitive inputs into the choice to hold many religious credences” (76).

On the compartmentalization of Vineyard people’s beliefs, he demonstrates how and where factual beliefs guide actions and what people religiously creed (i.e., the secondary cognitive attitude). In particular, Van Leeuwen highlights how sacred times (i.e., Sundays) and rituals meant to bolster belief are not forms of factual belief because they are compartmentalized to specific moments or places, specific episodes. He uses demonic influence as an example, showing that a shock from an electrical outlet is parsed as demonic in a religious setting, but such religious credence “becomes deactivated outside the religious setting” (80). More broadly, he concludes that “religious practical settings are constituted by participants’ expectations of limitedness in time and space, of characteristic cues that mark the limits, and of alternate assigned identities that obtain within the relevant limits” (81).

Van Leeuwen finally links these ideas to one of his central claims: factual beliefs manage secondary cognitive attitudes, and religious credence is a secondary cognitive attitude. Importantly, secondary cognitive attitudes do not determine factual belief.

On cognitive governance, Van Leeuwen shows how religious credence beliefs at Vineyard have limited cognitive governance, meaning they cannot be factual beliefs. In particular, Van Leeuwen highlights that prayers are based on factual beliefs (e.g., nobody prays for a carburetor to work the way it is not supposed to). Instead, people pray for and make changes to the natural world (factual beliefs) and later form “the religious credence that that had been God’s handiwork” (87). He also notes that people still continue nonreligious activities even when praying for those same things, which is likewise credited to God “post hoc as a gloss on any favorable naturalistic outcomes” (89). Thus, he concludes “the underlying factual belief layer is not redrawn by the transparency, though the images on the transparency may obscure some of its details” (91).

Finally, Van Leeuwen shows that religious credence is not evidentially vulnerable for four reasons: 1) Vineyard members “say they hold their ‘faith’ even without evidence or even in the face of contrary evidence” (92); 2) “members say they have a ‘choice’ about what to ‘believe’ ” (93); 3) members doubt religious beliefs (93); and 4) people stop Vineyard beliefs for social reasons (95). Thus, Van Leeuwen concludes, “This all supports the claim that there exists a ‘belief’ type that is not evidentially vulnerable, which means there is a ‘belief’ type that is not like factual belief when it comes to evidential vulnerability” (96).

With all this evidence, Van Leeuwen effectively demonstrates that religious credence is a secondary cognitive attitude distinct from factual belief.

In Chapter Four, Van Leeuwen considers the extent to which the model works around the world. He frames this discussion by acknowledging a potential criticism of his claim that the two-map cognitive theory of religion can work worldwide. That is, perhaps this model only works for WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) people. So, he presents evidence for each of the four factual belief aspects. In each section, he demonstrates the two-map cognitive structure is at play, not the one-map cognitive structure.

In Chapter Five, Van Leeuwen tries to disentangle “think” and “belief” as cognitive attitudes rooted in factual belief and religious credence, respectively. First, he narrates the experiences and anecdotal evidence that led him to conduct more rigorous studies on religious belief as opposed to factual belief. The initial study indicated that participants distinguished between factual beliefs and religious beliefs in everyday discourse. A subsequent study outside of the United States, Van Leeuwen notes, illustrated that people in non-Western societies also distinguish between factual belief and religious belief. Second, Van Leeuwen considers how people view the difference between religious credence and factual belief. Such a normative view appears in the statement “There’s no point in arguing with someone’s beliefs.” For most people, this common adage only applies to religious credence, not factual belief, Van Leeuwen suggests. So, he argues that people hold two expectations/norms: one relating to factual belief wherein change is likely through new evidence and disagreement is appropriate and another wherein change is unlikely through new evidence and disagreement is normatively viewed as inappropriate.

Van Leeuwen substantiates this claim by highlighting how a study on attitudes toward disagreement demonstrates the idea. He comments, “That people harbor different expectations and norms concerning factual beliefs and religious credences helps explain the interesting data that emerges in these studies” (142). As Van Leeuwen notes, material from previous chapters supports his claim. Thus, people view factual belief and religious credence with distinct norms and expectations. One key nuance Van Leeuwen acknowledges is the lack of cross-cultural studies demonstrating his argument. As such, he concludes that although believe/belief is often imprecise, it is helpful as a term of art indicating the secondary cognitive attitudes.

In Chapter Six, Van Leeuwen links belief with identity with a simple idea: “If a belief guides practical actions, it works best if it is true, but if a ‘belief defines a group identity, then it can still work or even work better if it is not true” (147). In this vein, “religious credence plays an in-group defining role; factual belief plays the action-guiding role” (148). He articulates this idea by positing and detailing two explanatory roles regarding religious credence and factual belief. Factual belief, he suggests, serves a “mundane explanatory role” wherein the content of the factual belief enables one to achieve their goals. By contrast, religious credence functions more to “explain what identity group [someone] belong[s] to” (151), which he terms the “groupish explanatory role.” To this end, he draws a line between the two, noting that “groupish belief does not need to be true for the actions they motivate to signal group solidarity” (152). Thus, for religious credence, Van Leeuwen suggests the groupish beliefs can be false but nonetheless foster “group solidarity through the symbolic actions they generate” (154).

Next, he details the various forms of identity, identifies various features of group identities, and explains how “groupish beliefs help constitute group identities” (160). Van Leeuwen succinctly describes the key to this section: “The collective roles that Groupish beliefs play in constituting group identity put essentially no pressure on them to be true or track evidence – and some of these roles even put pressure on them to be, as it were, allergic to evidence and truth” (163).

Finally, Van Leeuwen shows how religious credence, and associated groupish beliefs, are distinct from factual belief. He does so by arguing that group beliefs are not evidentially vulnerable, lack cognitive governance, are compartmentalized, and are voluntary. Thus, he concludes with his groupish credence thesis: “Religious credences differ from factual beliefs in the ways they do in part because they are Groupish beliefs” (172). He concludes by arguing that the two-map theory is better than the one-map theory at distinguishing sincere religious people from religious fakers, noting the gray areas.

In Chapter Seven, Van Leeuwen explores how “sacred values differ from ordinary preferences” (179) based on his claim that “religious credences are the identity-constituting imaginative attitudes that generate symbolic actions and fold people, places, and things into sacralizing doctrines and stories” (178). First, he describes four ways that sacred values differ from ordinary values: 1) humans value sacred objects differently than ordinary objects; 2) what is sacred varies from person to person and culture to culture; 3) anything can be sacralized; and 4) “sacred valuing involves imbuing every day, nonsacred objects with an imagined significance” (181), and such imaginings are religious credences.

Second, Van Leeuwen uses the golden plates of the Book of Mormon as a case study for a sacred object. Here, he suggests that the golden plates, which nobody really saw, were imbued with sacred value by religiously creeding 1) the metal plates within a supernatural narrative and 2) symbolic actions for representing the tablets.

Third, Van Leeuwen highlights six ways in which sacred values – in contrast with economic utility and rational choice theory – are features of behavior, not glitches or bugs. These six features – which “come in degrees and are logically independent of one another” (185) – include the following: 1) constitutive incommensurability (contemplating exchanging the sacred for the mundane or utilitarian yields a response of outrage); 2) incentive outrage (adding incentives to trade the sacred for the utilitarian triggers more of an outrage response); 3) insensitivity to the probability of success (“sacred values do not diminish when someone learns actions are less likely to succeed” [187]); 4) no temporal discounting (sacred value placed on an entity “is insensitive to how far it is in the future” [188]); 5) contagion thinking (nonsacred entities in contact with sacred entities either pollute the sacred entity or make sacred the originally nonsacred entity); and 6) group identity constitution (if an entity is sacred, “treating that entity as inviolable is a criterion of inclusion in one’s relevant group identity” [189]). Here Van Leeuwen offers an important nuance: “Sacred entities continue to be valued by the utilitarian value system under their mundane description” (190).

Fourth, Van Leeuwen identifies two puzzles in the tension between the sacred and utilitarian: why do people shun rational actions when it would help them achieve “their sacred aims” (191) and why are so many sacred entities “so easily discarded or replaced” (192)? Finally, and fifth, Van Leeuwen links the religious credence attitude to sacred values in a way that resolves the two puzzles. He answers this by first putting forward four claims:

1. “many religious credences people have describe supernatural entities that those people can’t locate in space” (192).
2. “Many religious credences link particular, concrete entities or spaces from the person’s sensible world to the supernatural entities described by detached religious credences” (193).
3. “If a person’s linking religious credences designate some specific, concrete entity in the tangible world as linked to one of the supernatural entities described by detached religious credences, then that person’s sacred value system attaches to that specific concrete entity” (193).
4. “People with linking religious credences continue to have mostly accurate factual beliefs about the linked entities from the sensible world; such factual beliefs largely correspond to those they would have had about those sensible entities had they not had the linking religious credences” (194).

The first question/puzzle of easily discarding or replacing sacred entities, he suggests, is explained primarily by claims 4, 3, and 1. The second question/puzzle of not using rational actions when they can help achieve sacred aims, Van Leeuwen argues, is the result of the sacred entity, the prop item that is typically mundane (item 4 above), enabling symbolic action and representing superordinary entities through the mundane. Thus, he links factual belief, religious credence, and sacred values to establish that factual belief is a different cognitive attitude than other secondary cognitive attitudes, such as religious credence or fictionally imagining.

He concludes the chapter: “What has emerged is a preliminary action theory of symbolic sacred action: symbolic sacred action is representational make-believe play, the execution of which is backed by the imperative force of sacred values” (197-198).

In Chapter 8, Van Leeuwen considers how his theory explains what he calls The Puzzle of Religious Rationality. The puzzle, in short, is that although humans are rational creatures who can live in the world with great success via rationality, we simultaneously hold religious beliefs that are typically not considered rational (199). He posits that his theory of distinct attitudes explains this puzzle, inasmuch as the factual belief cognitive attitude uses rational processing but things like religious belief, or religious credences, are a distinct, secondary cognitive attitude that cannot be expected “to rationally cohere with evidence or be internally coherent at all” (202), akin to how one has different cognitive constraints for imagining and make-believing in comparison to factually believing. He demonstrates the validity of his approach by analyzing other solutions to the puzzle and where his theory is a more helpful explanatory model, though I will not describe every solution with which he engages.

In the epilogue, three elements are distinct and notable as limits and show how Van Leeuwen envisions others using his work. First, the simple theory of the book is that “fragments of the multifarious social phenomena we call religions are large-scale versions of that: games of make-believe that define a group” (231). Second, he hopes that his research especially contributes to refining how we discuss “belief.” Third, having distinguished between factual belief and secondary cognitive attitudes, he returns to an important question but does not answer it: “Can religious credences also partly constitute knowledge in the same way” (234) as factual beliefs, albeit in a different cognitive vein? These points, among others, in the epilogue caught my attention. And as he hoped would happen per the final page of his book, I finished reading his book with a better understanding of my mind and others’ minds.

Continuing the Conversation (Critiques and Engagement)

First, Chapter 4, wherein Van Leeuwen tries to demonstrate the two-map theory’s presence throughout the world, risks losing its vigor as scholars from the areas he cites engage with it in more detail. Indeed, he presents quite a bit of evidence to substantiate his claim about the secondary cognitive attitude of religious credence, thereby evidencing the two-map cognitive structure. He points to the Vineyard members; “how Sesotho speakers in Southern Africa” (102) maintained a biological explanation and supernatural explanations for AIDS; explanatory coexistence (as with Southern Africa) for coexisting naturalistic and supernatural ideas in children, Mexico, and China; a case from precolonial Nigeria; Exodus 32; Mormonism; Alcoholics Anonymous; forced conversion; the Vezo tribe in Madagascar; and more. Now, to be clear, the wealth of evidence is convincing; however, specialists in the various areas he mentions will, in typical academic fashion, likely disagree with how he interprets or reads such scholarship or texts. I hope to see more scholars in these disparate areas engage with Van Leeuwen so that he can refine his arguments and eliminate the dross from his examples.

Second, and this question is beyond the scope of Van Leeuwen’s work but remains worth considering: Even if we accept Van Leeuwen’s two-map theory, it would be worth exploring how technologies like the Internet, social media platforms, and marketing shape the first map layer that is factual beliefs. That is, Van Leeuwen’s clean-cut between factual beliefs and other secondary cognitive attitudes, while helpful in certain circumstances, may sometimes be more messy than how he presents it in this book.

Third, one area Van Leeuwen’s work can be helpful for is in explaining the perceived overlap between fandom and religion. As he discusses extensively in chapter seven, religious credence is “imagining plus group identity and sacred value” (16). To be clear, I am not claiming that fandoms might be equivalent to religious credence, but I am suggesting that fandom as a secondary cognitive attitude (let’s call it fandomizing) may include features very similar to religious credence that are nonetheless distinct. For example, fandom may have a stronger distinction between factual belief and fandomizing than factual belief and religious “belief”/credence. Similarly, religious credence and fandomizing serve in-group defining roles, involve sacralizing objects, and engage with beliefs and ideas that some might not consider rational. Moreover, fandomizing is part of the broader phenomenon of make-believe that subsumes both fan fictionalizing and religious credence. So, while I am not an expert in fandoms, I do think it would be worth exploring how Van Leeuwen’s work can support fandom studies and address the nebulous overlap between religious credence and fandomizing.

Fourth, and this is beyond the scope of his work, I wonder if Van Leeuwen’s framework can help explain variations within ancient literary corpora as originating from deities. For instance, if a Mesopotamian scribe claims, “Text A, which I copied from Person B, which Deity C handed down to him,” could we view this as evidence of the first cognitive map (factual belief) being activated at the same time as the second cognitive map (religious credence)? Or would Deity C’s actions in this example, in fact, be something that the scribe factually believed? In order to address this issue, I would have to examine that potential against the four standards for factual belief. While I have no answer or solution here, I am confident that Van Leeuwen’s framework can help untangle how scribes may have perceived the content that they worked with in terms of factual belief (which maps onto the historical reality) and religious credence (which is less likely to align with the historical reality).

In a similar way, Van Leeuwen’s work ought to encourage scholars of ancient religion to explore the extent to which secondary cognitive attitudes are built into the languages and narrative structures of, for example, ancient Israelite and Judean literature. Is the language that might distinguish the two cognitive layers only evident through context (i.e., akin to Van Leeuwen’s example of the belief that John Madden is alive versus the belief that Jesus is alive) or through philology and semantic distinctions between different verbal roots? Again, I have no answer, but I am excited at the potential for Van Leeuwen’s approach to shed light on ancient Israelite and Judean religion.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I highly recommend engaging with Van Leeuwen’s Religion as Make-Believe. Indeed, most people will identify elements that are problematic and should engage with those elements. Even this review has not engaged and raised all criticisms and questions I have regarding his arguments. The book overall, though, offers a vivid, well-argued explanation for religious credence as a secondary cognitive attitude and should be a cornerstone to any consideration of how religion works in various contexts.

Review: “Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library” by Nathan Mastnjak

Nathan Mastnjak. Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 250 pp.

Summary

In Chapter 1, Mastnjak identifies the book’s broad, central concern. If the prophetic books are simultaneously akin to and distinct from their ancient Near Eastern counterparts, how do we account for these works’ existence? Rather than focusing on prophetic literature’s oral-to-written shift, Mastnjak raises questions about the history of prophetic scrolls’ materiality and how such materiality affects meaning. He demonstrates the pertinence of these questions by weaving into his discussion ideas from the field of book history and well-known biblical scholarship. In doing so, he argues that “book” is a fundamental conceptual category that is nearly invisible. His work aims to mitigate this problem by “grappling with its materiality” (8) and “writing a history of the prophetic scrolls” (8).

In Chapter 2, Mastnjak draws on a range of evidence to argue that the papyrus-to-animal-skin shift happened during the Hellenistic period, not the Persian period. First, he bolsters Haran’s claims that papyrus was widely used in the Persian period, highlighting the analyses of Philip Zhakevitch and Olaf Pederson regarding the popular use of papyrus. Second, Mastnjak engages with Hellenistic scroll culture and materiality, scroll headings in the Pentateuch, and various DSSs to argue that 1) long texts were likely written on multiple papyrus scrolls in the Hellenistic period, 2) Judean scribes switched to animal skins at some point, and 3) some scrolls, even animal skins, were not confined to a single scroll. Third, Mastnjak engages with and critiques various aspects of Haran’s argument for a shift to animal skins in Judah during the Persian period in order to argue that Judean scribes continued primarily using papyrus during this period. Finally, Mastnjak puts forward economic and historical data to argue that Judean scribes switched to animal skins “as the preferred medium of textual production and preservation” (29) during the Hellenistic period, not the Persian period.

In Chapter 3, Mastnjak demonstrates that ספר can refer to multi-volume works. First, he highlights texts in the Hebrew Bible, Aramaic inscriptions, Phoenician inscriptions, and Ugaritic material where ספר refers to written objects in different material forms, not just papyrus. Second, he shows how ספר can reference a multivolume work in Hellenistic and Roman literature, drawing from the DSSs and Daniel. Third, he shows where ספר refers to multivolume works in the Persian period through Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, and Jeremiah. Thus, Mastnjak concludes that “the considerations open up possibilities for the reader of the term sefer elsewhere in Classical Hebrew” (55).

In Chapter 4, Mastnjak sets the stage for examining scholarly assumptions on book history in Jeremiah, noting that we can refine our questions about Jeremiah by identifying book history assumptions and how those tie into textual variants. First, Mastnjak discusses how the idea of an original text comes from the rise of print books and feeds into “scholarship’s essential ontology of the text” (62). Thus, denaturalizing this idea of book history can allow us to start “reassessing old problems and questions” (63). Here, he shifts his focus to Jeremiah and tries to show why Jeremiah 36 is not good evidence for a model assuming a single book scroll from a single authorial event. Mastnjak continues by reviewing scholarship on the oracles against the nations’ (OAN) placement in Jeremiah to show how scholars view it as a linear development with a single vorlage instead of considering each distinct Jeremian tradition. This linear assumption reflects modern print culture assumptions. Doubling down on this, he links the previous scholarship with book history and print culture to articulate that “so strong is the influence of the print-book model that scholarship has failed to imagine the history of the Jeremiah literature as anything other than the growth of a book” (80). Shifting from Jeremiah and in light of his discussions on book history, Mastnjak argues that the redactional history of the Book of the Twelve is a helpful model for thinking about Jeremiah via a collection model. Subsequently, Mastnjak brings colophons from the Hebrew Bible and Akkadian literature, as well as Jeremiah’s mention of a “single scroll,” to strengthen his claim for a collection model in Jeremiah. This model likewise works for Psalms, the Book of the Twelve, Ezekiel, Daniel, Proverbs, and Samuel and the Song of Hannah. Simply put, the evidence that Mastnjak proposes for the claim that versions of Jeremiah reflect “a thematically and redactionally unified collection” as opposed to steps in composition history “suggest a reorientation of how biblical scholarship imagines its objects of study” (107). This reorientation moves away from “a teleological fallacy built into the concept of the development of the book” (107) and more accurately reflects the material reality underlying biblical ספרים collections.

In Chapter 5, Mastnjak explores a broad question: “What is gained and what is lost when prophetic collections became books” (109)? This question is rooted in media studies and agreement with Rudolf Pfeiffer that the Hellenistic period saw the emergence of “the book.” To this end, his central claim is that “in the creation of the books of Isaiah and the Twelve, prophetic collections were transformed into prophetic anthologies” (109). First, he describes the contours of the anthological genre in Jewish texts and relates features of that genre to the Neo-Assyrian prophetic corpus to argue that Isaiah and the Book of the Twelve can be seen as anthologies. He then focuses on the Book of the Twelve and articulates the books we have now (especially the MT and LXX) are anthologies. He demonstrates this by showing that cross-references existed before the anthologizing, and he suggests that anthologizers capitalized on these cross-reference catchword links to create “a sequential reading of the anthology” (120). Then, he focuses on Isaiah with the central idea that “the material known now as the book of Isaiah existed at one point as a collection of multiple scrolls” (120). Finally, he examines the voicing in First, Second, and Third Isaiah in light of this anthological habit and suggests that First Isaiah influenced the later editing of First Isaiah and the composition of Second and Third Isaiah; however, “this collection of scrolls had . . . the unity of an anthology, not the unity of a book centering on a single prophetic figure” (133). And this anthology of Isaiah is organized in a way akin to the Book of the Twelve, with a general focus on chronology.

Continuing with this chapter, Mastnjak argues that Hellenistic reading practices of paragraphoi evident in Leviticus Rabbah and 1QIsa^a “represents an indication of an early reading of the book as an anthology of prophetic texts rather than as a book that in its entirety is associated with the eighth-century Isaiah of Jerusalem. He further supports this reading practice, one that assumes the process of scroll collection to anthological collection to the book anthology being associated with a named prophetic figure, by highlighting that 2 Chronicles 36:20–23  and Matthew 27:9–10 attribute prophetic material in a way we might perceive as misattribution; however, Mastnjak’s model opens the possibility that the so-called misattribution instead substantiates his claims for scroll collections and textual fluidity: “It at least suggests that the fluidity of prophetic texts and attributions may have extended well into the Common Era” (145).

In Chapter 6, Mastnjak examines the MT and LXX Jeremiah narrative structures and plusses side-by-side to demonstrate that the process of shifting from a Jeremiah collection to a Jeremiah book scroll engendered creating distinct narrative arcs. Similarly, Chapter 7 argues that the story of Ezekiel in the MT and Greek Papyrus 967 reflect distinct book-making efforts. Thus, for both Jeremiah and Ezekiel traditions, Mastnjak shows that although previous scholars assume a linear relationship between these books, they were more likely created as distinct books (i.e., Jer LXX vs. Jer MT and Ezek MT vs Greek Papyrus 967) during the Hellenistic period with the new literary medium “of the long-form book-scroll” (214).

Continuing with Chapter 7, Mastnjak raises what I think should be a key question for any scholars who study their object through literary texts: although “a narrative reading implies a reading that proceeds from beginning to middle to end” and “producers of these books [i.e., Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah] intended them at some level to be read sequentially,” “did any readers actually follow this direction” (215)? Put another way, Mastnjak identifies various aspects of the author/compiler/composer of various book-scrolls but realizes that what an author intends is not always how a reader reads. So, how did readers adhere to the authors’ intended frameworks? Mastnjak finds some evidence for following the book-scroll narratives of Jeremiah in Sifre Devarim; however, second temple evidence, by and large, suggests a period in which “the reading communities represented by texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and rabbinic literature were either unaware or unwilling to adopt the narrative and sequential reading strategy that the producers of the book of Jeremiah and Ezekiel sought to impose” (219). Thus, Mastnjak highlights that Judean literary evidence suggests that not everybody adhered to the authors’ rules. Even so, he connects his work to a broader stream of scholarship that highlights ancient Judean interests in “the narrativization of non-narrative literary traditions and in the incorporation of non-narrative texts into a broader narrative of Israel’s history through practices of ascriptions” (220), which is the same impulse that drives the various book-scroll narratives of Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

In the conclusion, Mastnjak reviews his arguments and suggests that scholars begin to think “outside the confines of an anachronistic conception of the book” (224) and should instead imagine much looser assemblages of textual objects,” “a shelf . . . full of scrolls, sheets, and scraps” (224). This approach allows scholars to ask new questions of biblical criticism.

Highlights

Mastnjak’s Before the Scrolls should be a cornerstone for any biblical scholarship that considers notions of materiality in ancient Israelite and Judean (and Jewish) texts (and even ancient Near Eastern texts more broadly). Here, a few elements are worth highlighting.

First, Mastnjak beckons scholars’ attention to an oft-ignored aspect of scholarship: book history. As Mastnjak highlights, our assumptions about book history shape the questions we ask of biblical texts. In interrogating those assumptions, Mastnjak takes his readers on a journey to reimagine new, more likely explanations for what some scholars perceive as problems in biblical texts. This aspect is particularly interesting to me because of how it can help us better understand scribal practices in ancient Israel and Judah. As I highlighted in a recent SBL presentation, “The frustratingly few extant Judean and Israelite inscriptions make tracing such scribal networks, their associated practices, and their implicit scribal ideologies remarkably difficult, if not impossible, to extrapolate.” Although my work went in a different direction, Mastnjak’s focus on book history is imperative to addressing this challenge of understanding ancient Judean and Israelite scribal practices.

Second, and in the vein of my previous comment, I appreciate that Mastnjak takes general comments about textual traditions (i.e., Samaritan Pentateuch, MT, LXX, etc.) and roots that discussion in real-world, material conditions.

Third, I especially appreciate that Mastnjak turns scholars’ attention not just to how scribes and especially anthologizers structured and ordered material but also the extent to which readers adhered to those individuals’ or groups’ rules for reading.

Fourth, Mastnjak offers a helpful vocabulary for engaging biblical materials with greater precision: scroll collection and book scroll. I hope that scholars can continue refining these terms so that we can engage with the material in a more precise way. Such language can be helpful for moving away from a framework wherein “scholarship describes at every stage [. . .] prophetic books in the process of becoming” (67).

Finally, Mastnjak’s framework fits well with Sara Milstein’s recent work on Hebrew legal fictions. In Making a Case, Milstein shifts attention away from the typical law codes in the ancient Near East and instead considers how legal-pedagogical texts can shed light on biblical texts. As such, she argues that texts such as Deut 19:3–14 and Deut 22:23–29 should be understood as Hebrew legal fictions that were incorporated into an illusion of a law cluster and only later added and edited by scribes. These Hebrew legal fictions, she argues, are more akin to Mesopotamian legal fiction than Mesopotamian legal texts. Her ideas regarding Hebrew legal fictions, other Hebrew legal texts as fiction (e.g., Exod 21:7–11 and Deut 21:15–17), and even texts within the CC as pedagogical texts fit well with Mastnjak’s model. Mastnjak’s model does not engage with Milstein; however, his model of a scroll collection explains not just that legal-pedagogical texts form a foundational part of Pentateuchal laws but how legal-pedagogical texts may have made their way into Pentateuchal laws. That is, at some point, one pedagogical scroll could have become part of a scribe’s scroll collection, unordered and haphazardly organized. That scroll could have been from the scribe’s own son or from another scribe’s collection. In either case, the scribe could have come to see the legal-pedagogical text as part of the scroll collection, which would explain how it eventually made its way into the Pentateuch. Thus, Milstein’s claim that the Pentateuch’s “building blocks are rooted in legal-pedagogical exercises that originated in the sphere of scribal education” (157) takes on new meaning in light of Mastnjak’s work, as Mastnjak provides a helpful framework to explain how this came to be.

Criticisms

First, Mastnjak’s volume does not adequately consider how the scroll collection actually functioned in a real-world social context. That is, his work considers the nature of the material objects, the scrolls and scroll collections, but he does not consider how these scroll collections came to be. In Chapter 4, for example, Mastnjak leverages scholarship on book history to suggest that the influence of “the print-book model” has prevented scholars from imagining “the history of the Jeremiah literature as anything other than the growth of a book” (80). He roots this claim in a discussion on how models for the so-called book are culturally contingent and how different time periods conceptualize books in distinct ways. In order to strengthen this discussion, Mastnjak could have considered not only engaging with the abstract ideas associated with books and spent more time engaging with the social contexts of books, collections, manuscripts, etc. That is, how did scribes share books? Who was involved in the process? How did the technologies impact book production? If the LXX and MT evince distinct Jeremiah collections, to what extent were those collections the results of a single scribal family maintaining texts? And to what extent were materials shared between scribal families and communities? How does the movement of texts and writing within the Hebrew Bible possibly reflect how people shared scrolls within scroll collections? Although these questions are challenging to address with the dearth of in situ evidence of scribal ideologies and practices in ancient Israel and Judah and with the acknowledgment that biblical texts (i.e., fictive worlds) are not necessarily the best evidence for scribal practices and scroll sharing, concretizing his argument through on-the-ground evidence would strengthen his overall argument.

Second, and similar to the first point, I would have liked to see more in-depth engagement and consideration of how practices in ancient Mesopotamia can substantiate his claims about the scroll collections as a social phenomenon. On this topic, I can think of various materials worth engaging with: Eleanor Robson’s Ancient Knowledge Networks, the scholarship on the cuneiform science corpora in the first millennium BCE, Francesca Rochberg’s work on Mesopotamia and text corpora, John Wee’s work on serialization in scientific corpora, and more. Through engaging with other ancient material and book history, Mastnjak could significantly strengthen his overall arguments about the book history of the prophetic scrolls.

Conclusions

Overall, I highly recommend Mastnjak’s insightful book as a starting point for reorienting the conceptual framework that scholars bring to books and written texts. Although folks will take issue with some finer points, the overall idea is pertinent moving forward: we must be aware of how our ideas of book history influence our understanding of literary texts and their histories.

Review: “Before and after Babel: Writing as Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern Empires” by Marc Van De Mieroop

Marc Van De Mieroop. Before and after Babel: Writing as Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 360 pp.

Summary

In Before and After Babel: Writing as Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern Empires, Marc Van De Mieroop uses Sheldon Pollock’s cosmopolitan-vernacular model of language to consider language and writing in the ancient Near East. In the second millennium BCE, Van De Mieroop argues Babylonian functioned as the cosmopolitan language, the “language and script for their written communications” (2). While Babylonian remains a cosmopolitan language in the first millennium BCE, vernacular languages become increasingly popular alongside the cosmopolitan Babylonian language. While second-millennium interactions with the Babylonian cosmopolitan language were not focused on resistance in the same way as first-millennium interactions, both periods reflect strategies wherein scribes did not simply translate passages but “reformulated them to fit new contexts and ideologies” (4). As such, Van De Mieroop offers a approach to ancient Near Eastern writing, languages, and history with an eye to imperialism, the interplay between the cosmopolitan language and vernacular languages, and how this interplay developed.

Part I of this book focuses on Babylonian cosmopolitanism in the second millennium BCE. In Chapter One, Van De Mieroop reviews unilingual Akkadian, unilingual Sumerian, and bilingual Akkadian/Sumerian texts to show how scribes used such bilingualism to approach textual reproduction with creativity but within boundaries. In Chapter Two, he explores how various local regions incorporated Babylonian writing while, in some cases, holding on to local tradition as a conscious attempt to integrate themselves into a larger international network. In doing so, he emphasizes the ongoing, nuanced relationship between vernacular and cosmopolitan writing, between the periphery and the center. Chapter Three describes how although Babylonia’s scribal network and flourishing collapsed, scribal communities on the margins (e.g., Hittites, Sealand Dynasty, Susa, etc.) continued developing and maintaining Babylonia’s ancient scribal traditions. Chapter Four frames the use of Babylonian writing and the spread of Babylonian textual traditions as a form of second-millennium cosmopolitanism. In this environment, Babylonian traditions and writing were equally important for Babylon and those on the peripheries (e.g., Amarna, Hattushi, Emar, etc.). what Vav De Mieroop makes clear, though, is that even as each region tapped into this cosmopolitan language and tradition, local scribes modified traditions for their local culture. As such, he suggests “works of Babylonian literature became works of world literature. A Babylonian text never had such authority that it could not be altered” (101).

Part II of this book focuses on the increase in vernacular languages in relation to the Babylonian cosmopolitan languages and explores various aspects of this relationship. Before focusing on the vernacular languages and their interactions with the Babylonian cosmopolitan language, Chapter Five makes clear the Babylonian intellectuals worked to preserve their traditions through scrupulous continuity. Chapter Six considers Luwian’s ephemeral success as a vernacular language and it interacted with the cosmopolitan language. Similarly, Chapter Seven considers how Phoenician and Aramaic grew and came to interact with Babylonian. Chapter Eight takes a similar approach for Hebrew. What he highlights for Chapters Six through Nine, though, is how each vernacular developed apart from and simultaneously in relation to the Babylonian cosmopolitan language. In particular, each chapter highlights how the vernacular languages write in resistance to the cosmopolitan language. Chapter Ten brings these ideas together to suggest that the switch to an alphabetic system instead of cuneiform played a significant role in shifting how people wrote and understood texts/traditions, as alphabets could not be interpreted in the same way as cuneiform’s polyvalent signs. Thus, scholarship and intellectual traditions were “uncoupled from writing” (239), from script. The epilogue briefly considers how Greek overtook Babylonian as the cosmopolitan language and tradition.

Conclusion

Overall, Van De Mieroop synthesizes and compiles a range of topics, regions, and fields of study into a single, accessible monograph. In doing so, he has constructed a history of writing, scripts, vernaculars, and cosmopolitan languages in the ancient Near East. Undoubtedly, this volume can be a helpful starting point for a general audience and students. And, indeed, Assyriologists and biblical scholars may find small nuggets throughout his work. Even so, the monograph offer no particularly striking or ground-breaking analysis that will significantly impact Assyriology, biblical scholarship, or other adjacent fields. In fact, many will find themselves disagreeing with Van De Mieroop as they read this monograph. (The margins in my copy are certainly filled with comments, disagreements, question marks, and exclamation points!). Nonetheless, I want to reiterate that this monograph is an excellent starting point for familiarizing oneself with the history of writing in the ancient Near East.

In the following sections, I detail some my disagreements (based on my current research focus).

Distributed Libraries and Eleanor Robson

As of June 2023, I am preparing an SBL paper that explains the Pentateuch’s citational inexactitude via what Eleanor Robson characterizes as distributed libraries and ancient knowledge networks in the ancient Near East. In reading her Ancient Knowledge Networks: A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia, she comments that scholars tend to provide broad, generalist histories of cuneiform scholarship that do not account for local variations (p. 10). In particular, she highlights that Van De Mieroop’s Philosophy before the Greeks (2015) downplays “the historical, social, geographical, political and contingent in favour of overarching grand synthesis” (p. 43n1). Although Van De Mieroop indeed focuses on a grand, overarching synthesis in Before and after Babel, he adequately addresses some of Robson’s concerns. Throughout the volume, he attempts to account for the local variations in relation to the Babylonian cosmopolitan. Thus, Van De Mieroop has begun to address these matters, contrary to Robson’s comment.

That said, Van De Mieroop could take this a step further. (And perhaps others ought to do so!) For instance, Chapter Five’s discussion on Babylonian scholars’ scrupulous continuity invokes various libraries to ascertain how Babylonian scholars in the first millennium engaged with their traditions from the second millennium, broadly speaking. To strengthen his work, Van De Mieroop should not have solely considered Babylonian scholars in the first millennium as part of an overall synthesis; rather, he should have considered how the various so-called libraries each reflect distinct practices and patterns. Such an analysis would have resulted in a more nuanced understanding of first-millennium cosmopolitanism, scribes relationship with royalty and temple institutions constantly shifted, not to mention the frequently moving capital cities! In accounting for such matters, he might have been able to more effectively nuance Babylonian cosmopolitanism in the first millennium. Worth consideration, for instance, is that institutions and knowledge networks meant to secure and reinforce the Babylonian cosmopolitan may have unintentionally destabilized Babylonian’s cosmopolitan centrality. That is, shifting the capital multiple times, removing cuneiform tablets from the peripheries to bring them into the center, general political instability, and changing ideas about Babylonian scholarship may have contributed to its downfall. Ironically, these sort of actions may have been intended to reinforce the tradition. This example is but one of how more consideration of local variations could have improved Van De Mieroop’s analysis.

Writing as Resistance

Whether in biblical studies, religious studies, Assyriology, or adjacent fields, writing as resistance is a common idea. And Van De Mieroop rightly brings these fields together to construct an overarching narrative. In his words, “I have tried to accentuate the agency of vernacular authors and emphasized that they reacted to the cosmopolitan. Instead of merely receiving ideas, they actively appropriated them and manipulated them as acts of contestation” (225). Indeed, he is right to emphasize that vernacular authors reacted to the cosmopolitan and had agency. However, Van De Mieroop’s claim is overstated and does not adequately account for acts of writing that were not a form of resistance. While I don’t necessarily have the time or capacity to provide details or analysis in this vein in order to highlight why his claim is overstated, I can instead highlight the danger of simply claiming that writing is an act of contestation.

First, this claim fundamentally reinforces the idea that vernaculars gain all their knowledge from an external source and thus ironically implies they do not have agency, the ability to write and create in a way not entirely dependent on others. I do not think Van De Mieroop is arguing for this point, to be clear; however, he concludes with a broad point that could easily be taken in that way. As such, his central claim should have been more refined to prevent others from misunderstanding his text as seuch.

Second, specialists will likely disagree with the claim that writing is necessarily an act of contestation. Jeffrey Stackert’s recent monograph on D, for example, argues that D uses Esharddon’s Succession Treaty not to be subversive but simply for its own literary aims. Thus, Van De Mieroop’s broad claim is at odds with a Pentateuchal scholar’s recent detailed analysis. Undoubtedly, others have put forward similar arguments that certain texts are not about contestation or subversion but rather have different aims. Therefore, folks reading this book, whether as a general audience, student, or scholar, must engage with the specialists that Van De Mieroop works to synthesize, lest all a reader gains from the volume is an overly simplistic notion of how the vernacular relates to the cosmopolitan language.

Review: “Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch” by Jeffrey Stackert

Jeffrey Stackert. Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch. Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.

In Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch, one of Yale University Press’s recent additions to The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library, Jeffrey Stackert evaluates Deuteronomy’s status in the Pentateuch. Through the volume, he effectively synthesizes a broad range of scholarship into a single, cohesive discussion, developing various arguments throughout.

In the introduction, Stackert identifies the book’s goal: to disentangle the complex scholarly picture in order to create a clear picture and make claims in relation to this picture. Additionally, Stackert makes explicit his framework (Neodocumentarian and distinguishing literature vs. scripture). This framework ties into one of his foundational claims: “I argue that even as the Pentateuchal sources individually carry the hallmarks of literature, the compiled Pentateuch does not” (12). As such, Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch is a thesis-driven book; however, he counterbalances this thesis-driven aspect with a pedagogical goal: “While meant as a monograph, then, the volume also bears some features of a handbook” (2).

In Chapter 1, Stackert asks a deceptively simple question: what is Deuteronomy? With goals of precision, he first distinguishes between the scroll/book of Deuteronomy (i.e., Deuteronomy as part of the Pentateuch) and D (i.e., a separate literary work). Breaking down D further, Stackert considers four elements indicating D’s compositeness (structural duplication; content duplication; content contradiction [plot and law], and style/thematic differences [discontinuity]), but he still views D as a single literary work. Next, he argues that D is literary and that the Deuteronomy scroll is not literary, justifying this claim through Benjamin Harshav’s concept of an internal field of reference (IFR). Finally, he examines the legal and nonlegal sections in D to argue that D’s IFR is self-sustaining and does not require reading the text’s speaker as addressing the reader or a seventh-century Judean audience, as such approaches risk becoming allegorical interpretations based on the book of Deuteronomy as scripture rather than D as literature.

In Chapter 2, Stackert shows how and why D is a literary, revisionary work as well as the implication for D’s nature as part of the Pentateuch. First, he reviews major aspects of D’s literary revision, especially of E: reusing legal material, narrative in legislation, and nonlegal texts. He pays special attention to Deut 1–2, which interpolates elements of J, E, and P, and to the removal of a generation change in Deuteronomy. Subsequently, he reviews the three dominant theories on why D revised its forebearers: the subversion theory, supplementation theory, and resuscitation theory. Of these, he suggests the resuscitation theory “offers the most persuasive account of the evidence of D’s revisionary method” (84).

In Chapter 3 Stackert considers the ancient Near Eastern influence on Deuteronomy based on Hittite treaties, Esarhaddon’s succession treaty (EST), and other ancient Near Eastern treaties. First, though D and Hittite treaties have some overlap, Stackert forcefully argues that “claims of the influence of Hittite texts upon biblical texts should be rejected” (94).  Second, he highlights how EST relates to D. After reviewing scholarship and demonstrating connections between EST and D, he briefly turns to other first-millennium Mesopotamian and Levantine theories. While admitting similarities, he rejects arguments that D drew from these particular texts. Finally, he considers the nature of D’s revision of EST. Here, he makes three major claims: D does not reuse EST subversively but rather uses it because the text fits within its own literary aims; based on various evidence, including the paucity thereof, we do not need to assume an Aramaic copy of EST; and D’s use of EST should be viewed as creative adaptation, not a translation.

In Chapter 4, Stackert analyzes D’s reception as the D source and the Deuteronomic scroll. First, he shows how Jer 7:22–23 and other related Jeremian texts draw from an independent D. While he primarily draws from Nathan Mastnjak’s work, Stackert provides other links between Jeremiah and D to show how Jeremiah harmonizes D to fit within its own historical and theological aims. Second, Stackert considers how H draws from and integrates D’s tithing laws in order to challenge D and prioritize P’s storyline over D’s storyline. Finally, Stackert considers how Chronicles, Nehemiah 9, the Temple Scroll, and 4QMMT incorporate the Deuteronomy scroll (i.e., in a compiled state). Each example shows a unique way scribes transformed and harmonized D and the Deuteronomy scroll.

Based on the evidence discussed in chapters 1 through 4, chapter 5 discusses a plausible “time window for situating [D’s] composition” (135). Initially, he reviews the general dating options: the reign of Josiah, the reign of Manasseh, and the exilic/postexilic period. On the basis of D’s use of E, the Covenant Code, and Est, as well as H’s use of D, Stackert argues for a seventh-century dating. He then specifies his dating to the first half of the seventh century, and perhaps even the end of the first third of the seventh century, based on archaeology, the distribution of EST and how/when Assyrian leaders wrote adê texts, Judean access to EST, and the general political trajectory of the Assyria in the seventh century.

Overall, Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch is a fantastic addition to The Yale Bible Reference Library. Stackert deftly weaves a coherent, cogent scholarship review with well-reasoned critiques and arguments. Undoubtedly, his work will be a touchstone for scholarship on Deuteronomy, D, and the Pentateuch as a whole. Moreover, I can see this book becoming a standard in graduate-level coursework and reading lists.

Throughout this work, though, I continually returned to a consistent problem: how Stackert frames D as literature (as opposed to real legislation or law) and the theory he invokes to justify his claim. That is, how Stackert develops his argument for D as literature (not as law) and Deuteronomy as Scripture relies on tenuous, highly contestable claims and assumptions.

Before noting precisely how Stackert justifies his claim of D as literature, it is worth noting a more positive aspect of how he defines D as literature. Rather than forcing D into a literature frame ill-equipped to handle the text, Stackert’s theoretical framing of D appears to be an outgrowth of his broader observations regarding D and the Pentateuch. That is, he initially brackets off portions of the Deuteronomy Scroll as not D based on a source-critical reading, thereby leaving him with D. Subsequently, he reviews various factors indicative of D’s composite nature. Only after articulating these two aspects does Stackert argue that D is literature on the basis of a consistent internal frame of reference. Here, Stackert’s theoretical framing closely parallels his source-critical approach and explanation of D’s composite nature. As such, his theoretical framing of D as literature appears to be an outgrowth of his observations regarding D. At face value, allowing the text (D) to speak and lead to a theoretical formulation (Harshav) reflects a nuanced, thoughtful approach to the material.

However, this approach also raises red flags: To what extent does Stackert use Harshav’s definition and understanding of literature because that method and framework match a source-critical approach? Although the book’s flow suggests otherwise, is Harshav merely a convenient theoretical framework to bolster Stackert’s argument? Why does Stackert fail to engage with the much larger questions of what constitutes literature and why (e.g., Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory) and use such questions to inform his view on D as literature? And how does framing literature in a way other than what Harshav offers impact the strength of Stackert’s argument? While all of these questions deserve answers in their own right, space and time are insufficient to address each matter. So, I briefly focus on two threads: the broader field of literary theory and assumptions on literature’s internal consistency.

First, although using Harshav is not in and of itself a problem, Stackert inadequately addresses the broad swath of literary theorists who play an important role in the history of literature, as understandings of what constitutes literature vary by time and context. As Terry Eagleton highlights in Literary Theory: An Introduction, literature in the eighteenth century meant “the whole body of valued writing in society: philosophy, history, essays and letters as well as poems” and “whether it conformed to certain standards of ‘polite letters’” (Eagleton, 17). This example is one of many that Eagleton provides, but the point is clear: literature is not a universal, all-encompassing term with a clear definition but is rather culturally contingent. Undoubtedly, Stackert would acknowledge this point in a conversation, but my concern is that he does not address such a point in Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch and therefore risks implying to readers that Harshav’s approach is somehow more scientific and legitimate than other theorists positing ideas regarding what constitutes literature and why.

Second, Harshav’s model as Stackert uses it does not account for frictions and collisions within literary texts, the fact that literature needn’t always be cohesive. Eagleton comments: “There is absolutely no need to suppose that works of literature either do or should constitute harmonious wholes, and many suggestive frictions and collisions of meaning must be blandly processed by literary criticism to induce them to do so” (Literary Theory, 81). Put another way, considering D literature based on Harshav seems somewhat arbitrary, as Stackert’s model from Harshav depends on consistency and internal coherency. Indeed, Harshav may address this issue in his Explorations in Poetics and other publications. Perhaps his work would even offer a consistent, internally coherent rebuttal to Eagleton. If so, Stackert’s work would be stronger had he incorporated more of that content into his monograph rather than asserting Harshav as the best model for identifying what constitutes literature.

Even in light of these criticisms, though, Stackert’s work should be foundational reading in any course on D, the Pentateuch, and ancient Judean literary/scribal practices. I highly recommend this volume to graduate students, researchers, and even individuals whose interests are piqued by biblical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible.

Reflections on “Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia” by Jeffrey Wickes

As often happens at the SBL/AAR annual meetings, book distributors occasionally give away a handful of books on the conference’s last day. In 2022, I snagged a copy of Jeffrey Wickes’ Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith. Although the subject area was a bit out of my wheelhouse, I nonetheless read the book in its entirety. As a life principle, I work to read every book that I own: no page is left unturned. This post, then, offers a few of my reflections on Wickes’ monograph in relation to my interests.

As a whole, Wickes’ articulates how Ephrem navigates theological debates of his time and how to read the Christian Bible. That is, Ephrem’s poetry is less exegetical and more of a creative, literary world that brings together the horizons of his theological concerns and community with allusions to Christian biblical texts. Rather than summarizing Wickes’ entire argument, I will instead focus on two aspects that are pertinent to my interests.

First, Wickes highlights that Ephrem’s poetry often pushes against any investigation, inasmuch as God is transcendent and thus cannot be investigated and debated. Rather, Ephrem advocated for a stance that theological language and discussion external to the Christian Bible was problematic. To push against the so-called investigation, Ephrem often used narratives wherein individual biblical characters or groups are investigating the divine, for as Wickes’ writes, “Ephrem’s argument is negative, forbidding investigation into the divine: as the simple cannot understand the wise, neither can the wise understand the Creator” (35). The fact that Ephrem reframes and narrates these stories of biblical characters investigating is precisely what I find interesting. In previous posts, I have identified that universal categories like sin are highly problematic and that socially transgressive actions can fall under categories other than sin. Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith and polemic against theological discussion and investigation is an excellent example: his narratives and the characters investigating are not necessarily said to have sinned, only to have committed some sort of improper social relation. We can therefore see that socially transgressive behavior in Ephrem’s Bible went beyond sin. This observation is key because we ought to consider that even texts within the Hebrew Bible might be doing the same thing at moments and that not every transgression is a sin.

Second, Wickes identifies an economic “I,” in that “Ephrem depicts his poetry as resulting from a divine-human transaction” (65). Though I will not go into the details, one consideration was strikingly absent: sin. For all the economic terminology that Ephrem uses, I would have liked to see Wickes engage with Gary Anderson’s discussion about sin as debt. For even if Ephrem’s poetry does not clearly reflect debt as sin, exploring that dimension of Ephrem’s poetry might enrich our understanding of the Hymns on Faith.  

Overall, I recommend this work for individuals interested in late-antique pedagogy and liturgy, reception history, reflecting on the nature of biblical allusions, the history of theological debates, and, of course, Ephrem’s poetry. Although this reflection was brief and only noted one area of interest and one criticism, I do not want those comments to take away from the broader value of Wickes’ scholarship. Overall, I enjoyed reading his work and have no regrets. (Trust me, I have regretted investing time and energy into books.)

Reflections on Johan Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture”

After reading T. M. Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real, I decided to follow up on her discussions about play and religion. Initially, I read Hans Vaihinger’s A Philosophy of As If in order to understand the philosophical framework that formed later discussions about religion and play. Next on this list was Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Notably, this book was originally published in 1949. As such, some of Huizinga’s language and framework made me cringe, especially his frequent reference to the so-called savage and primitive. Nonetheless, this book provided some interesting ideas to chew on.

Huizinga’s central claim is simple: although not everything is named as play, play is a central element in all cultures and is formative for civilizations and societies. He demonstrates play’s role in a range of areas: contest, law, war, knowledge, poetry, philosophy, and art. In general, he offers intriguing examples of play for the respective areas, but much of his discussion is rooted in his definition of what constitutes play and how to identify play (as he discusses in chapters 1 and 2). Thus, I would have liked a more thoughtful, philosophically rooted discussion on what constitutes play. For while his definition of play is reasonable and understandable, it is almost too broad, to the point that everything starts to feel like a degree of play by the end of the book.

Still, play as a central element in culture can have value as a heuristic tool, a way to make sense of disparate data. For Huizinga, this is particularly true in his discussion of religion including a degree of play. In his words: “In play as we conceive it the distinction between belief and make-believe breaks down. The concept of play merges quite naturally with that of holiness. Any Prelude of Bach, any line of tragedy proves it” (25). This initial comment on play as merging with holiness is helpful for thinking about how religion works not because Huizinga is on to some fundamental reality; rather, his comment reflects a broader understand of how religion was conceptualized via holiness in the early twentieth century. He continues, “Primitive, or let us say, archaic ritual is thus sacred play, indispensable for the well-being of the community, fecund of cosmic insight and social development but always play in the sense Plato gave to it–an action accomplishing itself outside and above the necessities and seriousness of everyday life” (26). He later comments, “Play consecrated to the Deity, the highest goal of man’s endeavor — such was Plato’s conception of religion” (27). Whether Huizinga’s comments are true is beyond this post, but what remains key is how he uses holiness as a universal concept to redescribe religion as a form of play and to link the so-called savage/primitive with the modern person.

As Huizinga’s unversal holiness and savage-primitive language suggests, we ought to be careful when using this religion-as-play model as a heuristic tool, which Luhrmann does well. Nonetheless, I have seen some people reference Huizinga’s work for describing religion, but I’d like to see those people engage more extensively with Huizinga’s discussion when using his framework for religion.

All that said, Huizinga’s approach to play can be helpful for considering aspects of religion without invoking religious language. In particular, a religion-as-play model offers a way to consider socially transgressive acts not solely as sin but also, or instead, as breaking the rules, of being a poor sport. To utilize Huizinga, though, we need to combine his notion of rules with Luhrmann’s discussion of paracosm, the private-but-shared imagined world that religious groups live within and that makes the invisible real. First, Huizinga comments on the centrality of rules in a game: “All play has its rules. they determine what ‘holds’ in the temporary world circumscribed by play” (11). Here, Huizinga’s “temporary world” is equivalent to Luhrmann’s paracosm. Granted, the paracosm isn’t necessarily temporary; however, a paracosm might be stronger or weaker depending on the rituals and spatial circumstances. As such, a paracosm has rules by which the group must play. Continuing with Huizinga: “Indeed, as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play-world collapses. The game is over. The umpire’s whistle breaks the spells and sets ‘real’ life going again” (11). Here, we see that breaking the rules break the game. As such, breaking the rules of a paracosm can be said to break the imagined world where the invisible can become visible. It is at this point, at the moment when one’s actions begin to splinter the paracosm’s reality, that people within the religious group might identify the transgressors actions as fundamentally bad, evil, or problematic because the individual broke the game’s rules and, thus, is contributing to the world’s collapse and illusion’s weakening power.

Transgressing the boundaries of a game’s rules, of a paracosm’s logic, can be named different things in different contexts and function with a different set of game rules: in the Hebrew Bible, חטא; in Vedic texts, énas and ā́gas (Source); in Mesopotamian rituals, māmītu and hīṭu; in US laws; etc. As such, one strength of using the play framework to discuss socially transgressive actions is that we can group similar phenomena together without leveraging the term “sin,” a word and concept deeply inflected by Western theological discourse. Moreover, even for socially transgressive rules wherein sin may be a useful concept to leverage, this framework allows us to identify different transgression gradations: in the Hebrew Bible, for example, some transgressions can be grouped into subcategories other than sin.

Reflections on David Herman’s “Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind”

When I first purchased David Herman’s Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind, I looked forward to an interdisciplinary approach to narrative, leveraging the best ideas in the humanities and sciences. As my recent thought processes went, with modern scientific capabilities, we ought to start considering what sciences of the mind can tell us about stories, their power, and more broadly, religion. Herman’s work seemed to fit the bill.

Indeed, Herman is clearly a well-informed scholar with an in-depth understanding of narratology, psychology, storytelling, the sciences of the mind, and parallel fields. Page after page, Herman’s erudite, highly technical discussion reflects this reality. However, this in-depth knowledge quickly becomes a problem. Seeing that his work aims to bridge storytelling studies (i.e., the humanities, narratology, literary analysis, etc.) with the sciences of the mind, Herman makes clear his intention to use highly technical language for all the fields he mentions. Unfortunately, his consistent use of highly technical language from disparate fields, while aiming to unite various fields with a multidisciplinary model, becomes a roadblock for scholars in either siloed field. For if you have preexisting knowledge of literary studies in the humanities, you likely do not have preexisting knowledge of the sciences of the mind. And vice verse, preexisting knowledge of the sciences of the mind likely means you don’t have preexisting knowledge of literary studies. But because Herman writes as if his reader already work in both fields, readers from both fields are unintentionally cut off from the fruits of his study.

Importantly, I am not the first to make an observation in this vein. Early in the book, Herman comments on one of his reviewer’s observations: “the reviewer criticized my book-plan on the grounds that it contained unnecessary jargon. As someone who has been teaching challenging narratological nomenclatures to students at all levels for nearly twenty years, I am sympathetic to the reviewer’s complaint. But these classroom experiences have also taught me that technical terms, when used judiciously, are absolutely crucial for particular descriptive and explanatory purposes, and for establishing a viable basis for collaborative scholarly work. Thus, . . . this book in turn uses those aspects as a basis for focused cross-disciplinary or rather ‘transdisciplinary’ dialogue” (5). Essentially, Herman wants to use the proper analytical terminology and tools. As he is to his reviewer, I am sympathetic to his comment (e.g., do not get me started on “innerbiblical exegesis” and its subsequent history or intertextuality). Nonetheless, where Herman may miss the reviewer’s point, and perhaps I am refining or reframing the reviewer’s point, is that the jargon is not necessary the problem but rather how Herman uses such jargon.

The analytical terms he employs throughout the work are undoubtedly valuable, but the book does not use such analytical tools in a well-thought, planned manner. Instead, the book reads more like a string of jargon, with little to no explanation of such jargon. And where explanations occur, he relies on other jargon. As a result, the only way to make sense of his writing is to 1) research each concept separately, 2) read each article he references in his discussions, and/or 3) read every endnote.

Such a stringing of jargon is further problematic because, as noted earlier, this book is written for two historically distinctive fields that do not currently have much overlap. As a result, scientists and humanities scholars are likely to lose track of his ideas because they are expected to understand both fields already. Had the book been written in two parts, from the perspective of scientists looking to understand literary studies and then from the perspective of literary scholars seeking to understand sciences of the mind, this issue could have been mitigated, but this is not the case.

As such, Herman unintentionally further complicates the possibility of cross-disciplinary work. For while scholars like Zunshine clearly construct a bridge from the humanities to the sciences and many references in Herman’s work construct a bridge from the sciences to the humanities, Herman seems to find a new chasm, an entirely different rift. But this rift is less transdisiplinary and more an an attempt to establish a distinct field of study altogether. While admirable, dispensing of previous field divisions as such is impractical at this time. Perhaps his work will find more of a place in the future, but now is not the time.

Reflections on “The Philosophy of ‘As If'” by Hans Vaihinger

As I explored why religion scholars often framed fandoms—or aspects of fandoms—as religion, an AAR presentation drew my attention to T. M. Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real. In her exquisite volume, which I reviewed here, Luhrmann identifies the foundation of one of her chapters on scholarship about play. Such scholarship on play, she notes, is rooted in Han Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of ‘As If’. So, I naturally purchased Vaihinger’s work and read it to consider the extent to which is could help as a theoretical framework for thinking about the issue I raise on the outset of this paragraph.

In The Philosophy of ‘As If’, originally published in the early twentieth summary, Vaihinger explores how the logical function always function with an as-if framework and doesn’t necessarily, or often for that matter, align with reality. He derives these ideas from previous philosophers, especially Kant. This as-if framework divides any as-if claim into three categories: fiction, hypothesis, and dogma. Typically, dogma is to be avoided because little in our logical function within the psyche aligns with reality. Something is only a hypothesis when it closely and clearly aligns with reality. For the most part, though, most of what we perceive is a fiction. That is not to say, though, that perceiving something as a fiction necessarily means it is wrong; rather, something can be self-contradictory and fictional in terms of the logical function process but of value inasmuch as it is practical.

While much of Vaihinger’s work focuses on examples from the philosophy of science, his work nonetheless touches upon important themes and theories that can aid religion scholars. Regarding the ideas of a soul, god, immortality, etc., Vaihinger draws extensively from Kant, reframing much of Kant’s work to show the value of the as-if framework for explaining the logical function. For example, Part III of The Philosophy of ‘As If’ discuses—and quotes huge chunks of—various places wherein Kant more or less uses or implies the as-if framework, in which ideas are fictions that have practical value.

Now, because his work is so extensive and thorough, this post aim to highlight key findings and criticisms. In particular, I focus on putting Vaihinger’s ideas into conversation with other, more recent scholarship. Through facilitating such conversations, I hope to exemplify how leveraging and utilizing Vaihinger’s work more critically can be be beneficial to religion scholars.\

First, as I am particularly interested in ancient Israelite and Judean conceptual structures, Vaihinger’s discussion of the antithetic error is a fruitful framework for thinking through and defining ancient Israelite and Judean conceptual structures. In general, the antithetic error can be expressed as follow: “If, in fictions, thought contradicts reality,” something that Vaihinger demonstrates well and which is beyond this post’s scope, “or if it even contradicts itself, and if n spite of this questionable procure it nevertheless succeeds in corresponding to reality, then—and this is a necessary inference—this deviation must have been corrected and the contradiction must have been made good” (109). What makes this contradiction good is “an equivalent error of an opposite nature” (109), the method of antithetic error. Such a method uses what Vaihinger calls intermediate concepts, or concepts that enable a practical claim to be made but that drop out in the claim proper. After demonstrating how this method is used in mathematical equations, Vaihinger shifts toward a textual example. He write the following:

M (Man)—P (Mortal)—Man is mortal
S (Socrates)—M (Man)—Socrates is a man
S (Socrates)—P (Mortal)—Socrates is mortal

Here, Vaihinger highlights that “man” is an intermediate concept enabling the claim that Socrates is mortal; however, “as son as the result is attained the intermediate concept drops out” (121). Here, the method of antithetic error is at play inasmuch as “Socrates is mortal” is only possible because of the intermediate concept “man.”

For me, this framework raises a question in how we interpret texts: how can we, should we, do we, etc., identify whether an author’s language dropped an intermediate concept? This question carries weight in many situations of biblical interpretation. Take, for example, Psalm 29:1 (מזמור לדוד הבו ליהוה בני אלים הבו ליהוה כבוד ועז). How do we characterize the nature of the Sons of God in relation to humans? And should assumptions about humans shape assumptions about Sons of God? Vaihinger’s focus on the intermediate concept can help us articulate a possibility:

H (Humans)—G (Glory)—Humans give glory
S (Sons of God)—H (Humans)—Sons of God are like humans
S (Sons of God)—G (Glory)—Sons of God give glory

In this theoretical reconfiguration, we begin to ask now just what is evident in the text but rather what intermediate concepts dropped out in Psalm 29:1 so as to make Psalm 29:1 possible! Indeed, most introductory courses encourage this sort of approach, but Vaihinger’s method/approach is beneficial because we can visualize interpreter’s assumptions and possible intermediate concepts. Moreover, we can clearly link intermediate concepts to biblical texts when those concepts are explicitly at play. Finally, simply using the language “intermediate concept” enables scholars to more effectively articulate interpretive assumptions and claims regarding how the author constructed the text.

Second, Vaihinger’s law of ideational shifts is an alternative, philosophically grounded way to express Luhrmann’s faith frame, not to mention other adjacent concepts in her work. Vaihinger’s law of ideational shifts is straightforward: “it is to the effect that a number of ideas pass through various stages of development, namely those of fiction, hypothesis and dogma; and conversely dogma, hypothesis and fiction” (124). In this context, he identifies that a hypothesis becomes a stable dogma “through repeated confirmation” (125). This ideational shift from fiction to hypothesis to dogma is, in many respects, akin to Luhrmann’s claims that making gods and spirits real demands “intention and attention” (How God Becomes Real, 17). Throughout her book, Luhrmann frequent identifies different aspects of consistent intention and attention that engender the faith frame. Where Vaihinger is beneficial, though, is in allowing the faith frame to have a more specific process linked with the logical function and behavior in regard to the logical function.

Third, although Vaihinger focuses on the psyche and logical function, his description of how we attain knowledge, could be an intriguing approach to literary texts, perhaps beyond his scope but interesting nonetheless. In describing the logical function, reality, and apperception, he writes the following:

The psyche works over the material presented to it by the sensations, i.e. elaborates the only available foundation with the help of the logical forms; it sifts the sensations, on the one hand cutting away definite portions of the given sensory material, in conformity with the logical functions, and on the other making subjective additions to what is immediately give. And it is in these very operations that the process of acquiring knowledge consists, and it is all the while departing from reality as given to it. (157)

Put another way, Vaihinger argues that our perceptions of reality become more distant from reality as our logical functions sift through and add to the original input. This framing could, in fact, yield interesting results about biblical texts. While theorists like Benjamin Harshav advocate for literary texts that unfold, Harshav’s approach paired with Vaihinger could yield an approach focus on how sensations unfold as a form of knowledge. Moreover, such a consideration can also ask, “Did this author intend to represent a departure from reality or a movement and adherence to reality as the characters in the narrative experience more sensation input that shapes their subsequent actions?” For now, I’m not sure, but exploring this question in another post might be worthwhile.

Fourth, I want to end this post with some of my favorite quotes from Vaihinger. While I don’t have much to say about them, his words are thought provoking at least to me: “Thought in this way, creates for itself an exceedingly artificial instrument of enormous practical utility for the apprehension and elaboration of the stuff of reality; but a mere instrument, although we often confuse it with reality itself” (208). A page later, he write what echoes Simeon Chavel’s comment in a Criterion article about Johan Huizinga and religion as “as is” instead of “as if”: “If the psyche regards the general idea as a thing with attributes, it need not be deprived of this convenient and useful game; but the game should not be taken seriously so that the as if becomes a rigid it is” (209).

Review: “How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others” by T. M. Luhrmann

In How God Becomes Real, T. M. Luhrmann’s goal is simple: to explore and explain why and how humans “conceive of that which is not available to the senses” (xi). And while other scholars highlight imagination’s role in enabling religion, Luhrmann specifically investigates how religious behavior toward the invisible other enables “what is unseen to feel more present and alter[s] the person who performs them” (xii). Put another way, her central claim is that “god or spirit – the invisible other – must be made real for people, and that this real-making changes those who do it.” To substantiate her claim, each chapter works through a different hypothesis.

In Chapter One, Luhrmann argues that “people don’t (easily) have faith in gods and spirits” (xii). She develops this argument first by highlighting that while the modern West has a culturally specific way of thinking about what is real, indeed all cultures do so, humans nonetheless “distinguish what counts as natural from what is beyond the natural, even though they may draw the line in different ways and come to different conclusions at different times about what is on which side of the line” (5). So, drawing on a range of psychological and anthropological literature, she highlights how people – cross-culturally – think about and behave regarding invisible others in a way distinct from how they interact with ordinary objects. Put another way, “one remembers and anticipates as if gods and spirits matter” through religious ritual. Luhrmann makes sense of this line between the material and invisible other by introducing what she calls the faith frame: “In this way of thinking and interpreting, people hold gods and spirits in their awareness as if those gods and spirits are present and engaged” (22). She explains the faith frame via the notion of serious play, wherein Luhrmann echoes previous anthropologists who observed that “the sacred has a play-like quality” in which “the play claims,” namely, claims with no clear root in reality, “are also serious claims about the world.”

In Chapter 2, Luhrmann explores the role of narrative and world building in establishing believable religion [1]. This world, or paracosm, enables religious followers “to sustain their faith frame” (26) and grips their “private imagination so powerfully that . . . they kindle the sense that they are true”: world building and the paracosm make god feel more real. Such religious narratives occurring within a paracosm, a constructed world, thereby enable “us to imagine the characters as if they were real” (29) and build a sort of relationship with characters; however, in Luhrmann’s discussion, those characters with whom we build relationships in the world are gods and spirits. Thus, she effectively and rightly leverages narrative cognitive sciences to explain aspects of religious experience. Moreover, while a religious world, a paracosm, can mirror fiction, the religious paracosm has certain rules of engagement, signs of participation, and means of interaction, and such “interaction with the invisible other is one of the central features that sets the special world of faith apart from fiction” (32). After describing her in-field experiences regarding these through requirements for a religious paracosm, Luhrmann again highlights how serious play, the faith frame, allows practitioners 1) to use narrative and ritual to imagine and represent an invisible god and 2) to create a “private-but-shared imaginative world” (56).

In Chapter 3, Luhrmann explores the central role of training and orienting imaginations for their respective paracosms: “Absorption and inner sense cultivation kindle the realness of gods and spirits” (58). That is, based on her fieldwork and academic studies, “something like talent and training facilitates the felt realness of gods and spirits and the kinds of experiences people deem spiritual” (60). This claim is justified first via her fieldwork on witchcraft in England and on Christianity in evangelical Christian communities, wherein individuals learned how to treat what would normally be considered internal phenomena as external with an invisible other. Such an observation is reinforced by the Tellegen Absorption Scale, which shows that “people who score highly in absorption are more likely to say that God speaks to them” and that they have experienced God being present and alive (71) – an invisible other. Furthermore, based on her fieldwork, Luhrmann argues that inner-sense cultivation enables people to experience an invisible other. That is, various traditions encourage practices wherein people treat words and images internally generated as if they were generated externally or developing more vivid mental imagery and explain its origin as externally based on a constructed paracosm. Simply put, developing one’s ability to imagine vividly and to blur the internal-external boundary yields perceived relationships with invisible others.

In Chapter 4, Luhrmann builds on the previous chapters by not just highlighting the inner-outer boundary in one’s mind but by showing how the boundary, or the in-between area, plays a role in the religious imagination inasmuch as the boundaries speaks to how different ideas of “the mind” impact understandings. Indeed, how one thinks about the mind directly impacts how one judges or interprets an event or experience. So, Luhrmann discusses three case studies involving Christian churches. Here, she highlights that people experienced God in different ways in these diverse contexts “because of the specific ways that they attend to their own experience” (100). Similarly, the means by which God “spoke” back differed based on local training, cultures, and other factors. Therefore, Luhrmann effectively demonstrates that how people understand mind-stuff, real-stuff, and the in-between directly impacts how God becomes real for them.

In Chapter 5, Luhrmann’s more technical approach shows how “practices of attention shape the most basic evidence people have that gods and spirits respond” (111). For example, individuals in certain contexts might have goosebumps; and such a stimulus in some contexts is taught to be indicative of divine presence. Therefore, she works to account for this sort of attention to stimuli. First, Luhrmann draws from Emil Kraedpelin’s notion of “kindling” to suggest that religious experiences attributed to a supernatural source shape how one experiences the events itself and future events; and kindling in an ongoing process becomes “more habituated and more fluent for members of that social group” (113). Such kindling comes about through building blocks and event cognition: certain bodily events are “incorporated into accounts of gods and spirits” (114) and “categories through which people identify the events” (114), respectively. With this theoretical framework, Luhrmann designates three broad kinds of events: phenomena with names but no specific bodily anchor (e.g., certain feelings, such as goosebumps, when they perceive god as speaking to them), bodily affordances (i.e., experiences that occur everywhere but can take special meaning in a religious tradition, such as “a Holy Spirit experience” after crying in a church setting), and anomalous events (e.g., sleep paralysis) that “may or may not carry culturally specific labels” (116). While heuristic in nature, these categories nonetheless enable Luhrmann to define how people relate to and perceive their bodily experiences. So, she links these categories with her theory of spiritual kindling from previous work to show that “the theory of spiritual kindling predicts that the frequency of events deemed spiritual is shaped by culture” (120). Finally, she shows the value of this framework through two case studies, one of a US-based charismatic church and the other of Thai Buddhists: both groups pay attention to different things. So, she concludes, “their attentional patterns can alter something as basic as their perceptual experience. ‘Kindling’ is a more specific account of how attentional learning unfolds for people” (135).

In Chapter 6, Luhrmann explores a simple question: why does prayer work? Fundamentally, she describes prayer as a metacognitive process that naturally involves emotion management and thus changes “the way people attend to their own mental processes” (139). Here, she explores how multiple facets function metacognitively: reorienting toward the positive (gratitude), organizing experiences (confession), the assertion of hope (asking), words meaning more when speaking to an other (even an invisible other!), and the brain treating personalized prayer to an invisible other as if a person were speaking to a friend forming a real social relationship. Of all of Luhrmann’s chapters, this was one of my favorites.

In Chapter 7, Luhrmann works to bring the various chapters together by describing more broadly how people create social relationships with gods and spirits, with invisible others. So, she shows how various field experiences of a god’s social relationship can be good for individuals but not the social whole. Such diverse parasocial experiences, Luhrmann suggests, derive from differing senses of inner other and imaginal relationships. And she also shows examples of how social relationships with gods are clearly not good for the social whole. Thus, Luhrmann fundamentally addresses not only “why people think gods and spirits are real but about how they become and are real for them” (184).

Overall, I enjoyed Luhrmann’s work. And because the Ood will undoubtedly sing Doctor Luhrmann’s praise, I will instead focus on engaging with specific aspects of How God Becomes Real.

First, although I agree with and appreciate Luhrmann’s frame for religion, the as-if frame derived from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, more engagement with H. Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of ‘As If’: A System of Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, would have strengthened her notion of a faith frame. Although I do not have access to Huizinga’s book at the moment, Luhrmann’s representation of Homo Ludens does not consider what underlies the work. Vaihinger uses the as-if framework to explain the psyche’s logical function: everything is perceived “as if” because we can never describe reality in the truest sense. As such, the human logical function, or how we perceive things, always uses fiction by necessity. So while Luhrmann rightly draws from how play theorists use Vaihinger’s as-if framework, more engagement with Vaihinger may have enriched her discussion. For example, if we agree with Vaihinger that all human perception is filtered through this as-if framework and that this as-if framework is necessarily a fiction working toward understanding reality, how might that impact her work? After all, the as-if framework aims to describe reality, but focusing on making an invisible other become real runs contrary to this logical function, especially when people using this as-if framework fail to recognize that they are, in fact, using a fictional framework. In short, more attention to Vaihinger would have enriched this study. (Admittedly, this critique may have more to do with the play theorists than with Luhrmann.)

Second, to substantiate Luhrmann’s idea of a paracosm, we ought to turn to an outright construction of a paracosm. Karl Barth’s “The Strange New World within the Bible” explicitly argues that the Bible is not about history but rather leads readers “into a new world, into the world of God” (https://jochenteuffel.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/barth-the-strange-new-world-within-the-bible.pdf). This statement affirms Luhrmann’s comment that a paracosm, or in this case the Bible, enables followers to know their god through narrative. To push this point further: the fact that Barth explicitly theologized a paracosm raises another question: to what extent does intentionality in creating a religious paracosm impact how gods and spirits become real to followers? I ask not only in light of Barth but my own practices. As I reflect on my Jewish spirituality, I know that I am creating a paracosm for understanding and interpreting the world, but I also know that the paracosm is not necessarily reality. Rather, it is fictional. So, how might Luhrmann approach this matter? Put another way, we have three tiers: people who construct paracosms without realizing they are doing so; people who construct paracosms intentionally and perceive them as representing reality; and people who construct paracosms while recognizing those paracosms don’t necessarily align with reality. While I don’t have an answer, I will say that the issue of recognizing whether something is fiction (in Vaihinger’s sense) again highlights that additional consideration of Vaihinger’s philosophy on its own terms may have strengthened Luhrmann’s theoretical constructions.

Third, as much as I enjoyed Luhrmann’s discussion on prayer, her discussion about prayer as metacognition could take into consideration metarepresentation. Within Theory of Mind, metarepresentation is our ability to tag and track information. What if, though, part of the metacognition in prayer is reorienting and retagging our metarepresentations of events, people, and ideas? Indeed, Luhrmann alludes to this idea, inasmuch as she says that prayer is a reflection that attempts “to sculpt, shape, reframe, reword, and remaster thoughts and feelings” (140). Incorporating metarepresentational reconsiderations as part of prayer in some ways aligns with Luhrmann’s comment on confession in prayer, that it enables people “to organize experience” (146). Ultimately, linking metacognition with intentional metarepresentation may be a more precise, helpful way of thinking through why prayer works. Moreover, intentional metarepresentation also becomes a means by which a follower and person praying can reinforce their faith frame, which compliments her discussion from chapter 1.

Overall, I highly recommend How God Becomes real by T. M. Luhrmann. As my extensive marginal notes in the book suggest, her work is a helpful theoretical model for thinking about religious experience and related phenomena.

[1] To be clear, Luhrmann does not use the language “world building” but rather simply a world. I redescribe Luhrmann’s work with world building in light of Building Imaginary Worlds by Mark J. P. Wolf.