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This is Chapter 9 of our MUST READ/MUST OWN book: The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture by Yoram Hazony. The author used two words throughout his discussion and now takes the time to explain what he means by each word. Reformatting and highlights added.—Admin1.]
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God’s Speech After Reason and Revelation
Not too long from now, it may be possible to write a comprehensive work on the ideas of the Hebrew Scriptures. But for now, such a work remains out of reach – at least for me. This book was meant to be something much more modest. It’s an introduction. And in it, I’ve tried to accomplish two things:
- I’ve suggested a methodological framework I believe can permit a more rapid advance in the direction of a well-articulated understanding of the philosophical content of the Hebrew Scriptures than we’ve seen so far.
- And I’ve conducted a number of investigations into the philosophical concerns of the biblical authors that make use of this framework as a basis.
My hope is that this methodological framework and these investigations together will suffice to make the case that the philosophical exploration of Hebrew Scripture is both possible and much needed; and that this project will now seem more plausible both to those who have been skeptical about it, and to those who have been interested and excited by the prospect of such a project but have wanted a clearer sense of what it would involve.
At this point, I’d like to put my pen down and hear what others have to say, and especially to see what others can contribute to this, our joint project. But there is one other subject I should touch upon before closing – the question of whether we wouldn’t be better off discarding the reason-revelation dichotomy entirely in reading the Hebrew Bible. I will say a few words about this now.
This book was written to answer the question of whether the Hebrew Scriptures can be profitably read as works of reason, rather than revelation. In the Introduction to the book, I wrote that if we are forced to choose between reading the Hebrew Scriptures as reason or as revelation, we’ll get much farther in understanding what these texts were intended to say to us if we read them as works of reason. And nothing I’ve seen in the course of preparing my manuscript has suggested that I was mistaken in this.
In reading the Hebrew Scriptures as philosophical works, whose purpose was to assist individuals and nations looking to discover the true and the good in accordance with man’s natural abilities, we unlock the texts in a way that immediately brings to light many ideas that had been largely invisible when these works were read as revelation.
But at the same time, I also wrote that I don’t actually think the “reason” side of the Christian reason-revelation dichotomy is capable of doing full justice to the content of these texts either.
The reason-revelation distinction is alien to the Hebrew Scriptures, and ultimately this framework is going to have to be thrown out as a basis for interpreting the Hebrew Bible. Even after we’ve come to understand the teachings of these texts as they appear when read as works of reason, there will still be a second step that needs to be taken – one that involves discarding the reason-revelation distinction completely, and learning to see the world as it appeared to the prophets of Israel, before the reason-revelation distinction was invented. A few words, then, about this second step. The rest I will leave for another work.
The traditional distinction between reason and revelation was based on the medieval model of what human reason is. On this view, reason involves deducing perfectly certain propositions from other propositions taken to be self-evident, or derived from immediate sensation. In the wake of the successes of Newtonian science, this understanding of what reason is all about pretty much collapsed. But despite the passage of centuries, no consensus has emerged as to what is to replace it. Philosophy and the cognitive sciences still await an account of what we are talking about when we speak of reason that will have a fraction of the support that the medieval conception of reason had in its day. 1 And at this point, the suggestions being made are only getting wilder.
In the last few decades, scholars studying the mind have suggested that the emotions may be directly implicated in the normal processes of human reason. 2 Others have concluded that reason depends, at its foundations, or metaphor and analogy.3 Yet others have proposed that mental operations such as “insight” or “intuition” will be needed to make sense of human reason.4 I won’t try to evaluate any of these claims here. But the trend is obvious to anyone who cares to look.
What is happening is that many of the mental phenomena that the Western philosophical tradition had had pegged as being “opposed to reason” are now being proposed for rehabilitation – not because anyone is in favor of irrationality, but because these operations of the mind may simply turn out to be a part of the picture of what rationality really is.
With respect to revelation, we at first seem to be in better shape. But I’m not sure how long this impression is going to last, either.
Medieval philosophy was based on an Aristotelian metaphysics that made answering the question of what “revelation” is look deceptively easy. As discussed in Chapter 7, this was a view that required the division of reality between two realms – one “outside” the mind and another “inside” the mind or in speech. This outside-inside scheme offered an easy way of recognizing revelation:
Whatever is outside is “reality,” which is identical with God’s understanding of things. If knowledge of what is outside the mind, in reality, suddenly appears inside the mind, yet without any process of human reasoning taking place to bring this about, then one could think of this as a miracle, a revelation.
Revelation is thus conceived as a unilateral inpouring of the truth from outside, an inpouring that is unilateral on God’s part, an act of divine grace.
But what we’ve seen of the metaphysics of Hebrew Scripture causes serious problems for this view of what revelation is all about. Chapters 6-7 suggested that the metaphysics of some of the biblical authors, if not all of them, is radically monistic – that it defines knowledge and truth in terms of only one realm, without recourse to Aristotle’s outside-inside distinction.5 True words (understood also as “things”) are those that stand, or hold good, through time in this one realm. God’s words (understood also as “things”) are those that stand, or hold good, above all others. On the face of it, this seems to mean that when Isaiah or Jeremiah speaks of “God’s words,” he is not talking about something he recognizes as coming from “outside” of him. It’s not an inpouring that is being described, then. Nor is he talking about something coming from “inside,” as Schleiermacher wanted us to believe. It’s something else.
What exactly is it that Jeremiah was experiencing on those occasions when God’s speech filled his mind? Unfortunately, his orations are not intended to capture the phenomenology of prophecy. In fact, none of the prophets are much interested in sharing this kind of information with us. In Jeremiah’s writings, for example, virtually the only passage offering us an explicit account of what his exchanges with God are like is his description of his first encounter with God as a youth. This passage opens with an extended “calling,” in which the young man is told to stand and speak to the nations of their rise and fall,6 which is presented as God’s own words. But when it comes to the actual content of the prophecy that Jeremiah is to deliver, the text shifts gears and we encounter something quite different.
God now asks Jeremiah what it is that he sees:
Jeremiah 1:
11. And the word of the Lord came to me saying: What do you see, Jeremiah? And I said: “I see an almond [shaked] stick.”
12. And the Lord said to me: You have excelled in seeing, for I am watchful [shoked] to accomplish my word.
13. And the word of the Lord came to me a second time saying: What do you see? And I said: “I see a seething pot, and its face is to the north.”
14. And the Lord said to me: From the north, evil will break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.
Twice, God asks Jeremiah what he sees, and twice the young prophet responds with a metaphor that cuts to the heart of the condition of Judah and Jerusalem.7
- First, Jeremiah sees an almond tree, which in winter appears as a barren stick with neither leaves nor fruit, but is called a shaked in Hebrew – a cognate of the verb shakad meaning “to be diligent” – because it blossoms in January and bears fruit within three weeks, the first of the trees in Israel to awaken from its barrenness and fulfill its hidden promise each year.8Jeremiah’s second metaphor, a seething pot with its face to the north, depicts Jerusalem in a manner that is close to home: The cauldron roils with moral decay and political instability, and Jerusalem, bounded by steep precipices on all sides but the north, can only be militarily conquered from that direction.9 This is a metaphor that invokes not the future hope of the city, but its slide toward destruction.
- Jeremiah looks upon the kingdom, endangered and troubled, but sees the fulfillment of God’s promise that Jerusalem will flower and bear fruit. This is difficult metaphor to extract from the events of Jeremiah’s day, and God responds to Jeremiah’s metaphor by telling him he has “excelled in seeing.”
If we consider this give-and-take between God and man as an example of prophecy as Jeremiah experiences it, a few points stand out.
- First, contrary to the common understanding of the prophet as a passive vessel into which God’s message is poured from on high, it is difficult to escape the emphasis on Jeremiah’s own role in the shaping of his prophecy. In this exchange between Jeremiah and God, the term used in describing what Jeremiah is doing is not a specific term for prophecy, but the Hebrew word ro’eh, which is the conventional term used for seeing.10 God asks Jeremiah not what he prophesies, but simply what he sees when he looks out at Jerusalem. Moreover, while this prophecy does begin with an approach from God, this approach is not in the form of God holding forth on a subject of concern to him. Rather, it is in the form of a question: God asks what it is that Jeremiah sees, and after Jeremiah has given an answer, God responds to what Jeremiah has said by telling him that he has “excelled in seeing.” Obviously, there would be no point in God telling Jeremiah that he had “excelled in seeing” if Jeremiah’s role here were simply to look at ready-made images that God has placed before him. In that case, it would be God who had excelled in presenting. But here the emphasis is unambiguously on Jeremiah’s own capacity for vision, for seeing the truth when he looks upon the city.11
Looking more closely at this passage, we see that Jeremiah’s experience of prophecy is in fact in three parts, two of which are depicted as deriving from God, whereas the third comes from Jeremiah himself:
(i) God asks: Jeremiah becomes aware of a difficult in understanding reality as it presents itself before him.
(ii) Jeremiah sees: Jeremiah discovers a metaphor, a concept from his previously existing stock of everyday terms, which appears to him most truly to describe the reality that has presented itself to him.
(iii) God confirms: Jeremiah understands that his analogy, when measured against reality, provides a deeper, more accurate truth concerning the nature of reality.
We therefore see Jeremiah’s prophecy as being in the form of a cycle. God does indeed initiate. But what he brings into the prophet’s mind is, in the first place, not an answer but only a question: Jeremiah becomes aware that his experience is in some sense inexplicable, and he is called upon to give an answer of himself.12
- In the second stage, it is Jeremiah’s seeing, which is praised for its acuteness, that provides the answer. Only thereafter, once Jeremiah has hit upon the metaphor that holds the key to understanding the reality before him, does the prophet hear God’s voice confirming and answering.
In Chapter 3, I suggested that the prophet’s reliance on metaphor is related to the need to be able to present difficult arguments to a broad audience.13
Arguments made by way of analogies drawn from common experience – the stallion, the watchmen, the seething pot – would be more readily understood by the prophet’s audience than the same argument couched in abstract terms. I think that this is right, and that the claim that prophetic metaphor is intended to obscure the argument of the prophet, so that only some might be able to understand it, is obviously wrong. But considering what we’ve seen here, it doesn’t seem to give us the whole picture. For Jeremiah, it appears that argument by metaphor is not merely a convention adopted for the sake of the crowd. It is, as the report of his first prophesies suggests, the primary mode of his “seeing,” and that which permits him to cut to the heart of the reality before him and to see things as they really are: It is in seeing a man as a charging stallion, in other words, and a prophet as a watchman on the city wall, that he is able to see these things for what they really are, and to understand them as they should be understood.14
I am not here suggesting that when Jeremiah hears God speak, this is not really revelation or miraculous knowledge – just as I was not trying earlier to suggest that when we incorporate sentiment, metaphor, and insight into our model of what the human mind is doing when we think straight, this means that we are no longer talking about reason.
We may still wish to recognize God’s speech as revelation, and we may still want to call our normative thought processes, when they’re doing what they’re supposed to do, reason. But without the metaphysical scheme that was used to underwrite the medieval conception of revelation, I’m afraid this term just isn’t going to be left with much meaning to it. Like the definition of revelation looks as if it is in danger of slipping to the point where we no longer really know what we’re talking about when we speak of it.
I have said that if we wish to understand Hebrew Scripture, we will ultimately have to give up on the reason-revelation distinction. Perhaps the reasons for my saying this are now clear. Given that the biblical metaphysics does not appear capable of sustaining the Greek-style conception of revelation as an inpouring from another realm, we will have need of a new conception of revelation that is an outgrowth of, and compatible with, what we know of the biblical metaphysics. This we will eventually succeed in obtaining, just as we will ultimately settle on a better understanding of what is meant by reason than what we have to work with not. What is not clear at all is to what extent our understanding of God’s revelation to man in Hebrew Scripture, and our understanding of reason, once both of these terms have become clear and firm, will remain things that are possible for us to hold apart and keep distinct from one another.