using the narratives of the Bible to confront the oppressive pharaohs of their age, reggae artists were faithful to Hebrew conceptions of redemption and justice. And they were faithful to the rebellious and melodious understanding of nephesh in the Psalms, its curious ability to achieve wisdom through the right ingredients of protest, passion, affection, melody, and cadence. What Bob Marley called a “soul rebel” (the title of Bob Marley’s 1970 studio album) belongs to this Hebrew bloodline of nephesh.8
In this world of the Psalms, then, the heart is capable of penetrating insights, so that human reason is never estranged from the passions and sentiments. A crucial biblical insight follows on the heels of this understanding, one that is key to my study: namely, that knowledge of the heart is accessible to all, educated or illiterate, lowly or highborn. In the biblical vision God makes wisdom lavishly open to everyone (and flagrantly, too, when it threatens the official scribes and priests). Since the Sinai covenant was established with all the Israelites, both the lettered and the unlettered, knowledge and obedience are enjoined on all; it is not a covenant made only with a philosophical or aristocratic elite. “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thy heart; and thou shall teach them diligently to thy children” (Deut. 6:6–7).
Since it makes no discriminations between rank, class, or wealth, divine wisdom is widely disseminated in this tradition. If anything, the Hebrew God seeks out those barren of such distinctions and rescues them from oblivion and disregard (cf. Hannah’s prayer, 1 Sam. 2:7–8). In the biblical vision the heart of the humble person is more likely to be the bearer of wisdom than the puffed-up heart of the proud and powerful one. The heart is a conduit of a special kind of knowledge unlike anything the eye can see or ear can hear, a custodian of an ironical wisdom, as in this pivotal text when Samuel goes against convention to anoint Jesse’s youngest son, David: “And the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Look not to his appearance and to his lofty stature, for I have cast him aside [Jesse’s oldest son, Eliab]. For not as man sees does the Lord see. For man sees with the eyes and the Lord sees with the heart’” (1 Sam. 16:7). In the ways of the corrupt world, the firstborn will always inherit position and power, but the biblical God casts this preference aside and exalts the lowly, a transformation of great historic significance. In the prophetic tradition (as in this case of Samuel’s choice of David), the eyes of the seer—clouded over and blind to the world’s values—follow this intuitive vision of the heart, in which truth and justice are revolutionary and subversive of the status quo.
Isaiah puts it this way: “I dwell in a high and holy place, say the Lord, but with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite” (Isa. 57:15). Though God comes from on high, he appears on the stage of human history among the simple and lowborn. And this message is central to the story of Exodus, in which God appears to Moses as a God of the oppressed slave. Though Moses was summoned to mountainous heights, he was assured that the God of his ancestors had seen the Israelites’ afflictions and heard their cries, and “therefore I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians” (Exod. 3:7–8).
In branding this memory of slavery on the soul of the Torah, the biblical authors demanded that its hearers and readers constantly revisit this sacred theophany, never allowing comfort or success to induce the stupor of forgetfulness. For our purposes, this means that the matter of soul in the Bible is represented in earthly shades and colors, in black and brown hues that are indicative of the struggles of the lowly. Any search for soul in the Bible must accordingly travel with the Israelites through these narratives of captivity and exile, cross the river Jordan, and always welcome the Other who comes in the form of the poor and enslaved. These circumstances and injunctions alone place the Hebrew concept of the soul at an infinite distance from Greek, aristocratic conceptions of the soul (whether the aristocracy of the hero, as in Homer, or the aristocracy of the philosopher, as in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle).
NEPHESH IN ITS NARRATIVE CONTEXT
The Inscrutability of God and Man in the Bible: The Shadows of Nephesh
Auerbach opens Mimesis, his extraordinary journey through Western literature, with a contrast between Homer and the Bible, the Greeks and the Jews. Though his subject is the story of literature from antiquity to the twentieth century, one of its key themes is the formative influence of biblical narrative on the entire scope of Western literature. In considering biblical narrative with such care and insight, Auerbach was something of a rare fish in literary circles of the early twentieth century, swimming against the stream of interpretation that regarded the Bible with enlightened condescension, ranking it far below the Greek imagination.9 As an exile himself—a German Jew forced into exile by the Nazis in 1935—he regarded the urgent realism of the Bible, especially the narratives of expulsion and bondage, as a key to his own self-understanding and more generally as a key that might unlock the hermetic codes of modern literature.
By concentrating on the form and style of these sacred texts and contrasting them with Homer, Auerbach made various discoveries. One in particular has to do with the laconic and rough tongue of biblical narratives. In Auerbach’s reading, biblical narrative is far more restrained than Homer’s epic poetry: it holds much back and does not explain everything; it leaves things and characters partially unsaid, unknown, and unexplained; and it controls language with an ascetic discipline. His primary example is the command to Abraham in the matter of his son, Isaac (Gen. 22:1). From out of nowhere, from some mysterious height or undetermined depth, God suddenly appears to Abraham and demands obedience. In contrast to Homer’s narratives, very little is said about the setting in which this happens, the characters, or their motives, and even less is said about the nature of this unpredictable, unfathomable God. The contrast with Homer is illustrative: “Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come like Zeus or Poseidon from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations of his own heart been presented to us.”10 In contrast to Homer’s depiction of the gods, the Bible veils God with profiles of indeterminacy; he is devoid of anthropomorphic features, totally Other. In painting pictures of the divine with words instead of images, Israel deconstructed the common representations of pagan gods, choosing to envision God in impalpable, imponderable forms, without a vast array of visualizations. As a fitting illustration of this perspective, the symbol of emptiness became a rich allegory for the Jews, a signifier of the desert-like barrenness of YHWH. Legend has it, for example, that when Pompey conquered Israel and approached the Holy of Holies, he was startled to find an empty room. According to Tacitus, he remarked: “The shrine had nothing to reveal.” Pompey, it seems, expected something tangible, some effigy in burnished gold or bejeweled silver, but he found nothing of the sort. The significance of emptiness was lost on him; it was a blank and meaningless sign to him and his legions, but for the Jews there was splendor in emptiness. YHWH was an anagram of the desert landscape itself, a luminous void, making all images of G-d evaporate in the sun like puddles of water on the burning desert soil, turning them into a fleeting mirage that forever recedes before one’s eyes.11
Similar mirages or shadows are apparent in the Bible’s representation of its key characters. Though we clearly learn about biblical characters in the Hebrew Bible, there is nonetheless a shroud of secrecy, a penumbra of obscurity, and a subtle haziness that keeps them hidden from human knowledge. In considering these characters, we are faced with an impossible question like the one Moses poses to God: What is your name? The response, “I am who I am, YHWH,” is an answer with gaps and fissures, lacking in vowels, a reminder of divine ineffability. When Isaac is introduced, for example, we are only told that Abraham loves him, not whether he is handsome or ugly, intelligent or stupid, tall or short, kind or cruel. Details are scant. In fragmentary speech and resounding silences, the narrative simply instructs Abraham to take Isaac and “go forth” (in the same spirit of Abraham’s first summons to leave his homeland and migrate to a new land in Gen. 12:1–3, a model for all intrepid explorers).12 In the space of this terse narrative,
