2 In matters of dating, authorship, and other exegetical material on the Old Testament here and elsewhere in this chapter, I have relied on several authorities but primarily the respective articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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story of the flood is a monotheistic rewrite of old Sumerian inscriptions;3 the story of Jacob may well date to before 1000 B.C., but that of Joseph, his supposed son, on the very next pages comes from at least 500 years later.4 It had all begun with the discovery of the manuscript of Deuteronomy in Jerusalem in 621
B.C. by King Josiah, after he ordered the temple cleaned and cleared of its remaining bicameral rites. And Khabiru history, like a nomad staggering into a huge inheritance, put on these rich clothes, some not its own, and belted it all together with some imaginative ancestry. It is thus a question whether the use of this variegated material as evidence for any theory of mind whatever is even permissible.
Amos and Ecclesiastes Compared
Let me first address such skeptics. As I have said, most of the books of the Old Testament were woven together from various sources from various centuries. But some of the books are considered pure in the sense of not being compilations, but being pretty much all of one piece, mostly what they say they are, and to these a thoroughly accurate date can be attached. If we confine ourselves for the moment to these books, and compare the oldest of them with the most recent, we have a fairly authentic comparison which should give us evidence one way or another.
Among these pure books, the oldest is Amos, dating from the eighth century B.C., and the most recent is Ecclesiastes, from the second century B.C. They are both short books, and I hope that you will turn to them before reading on, that you may for yourself sense authentically this difference between an almost bicameral man and a subjective conscious man.
For this evidence is dramatically in agreement with the hy-3 Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Efic and Old Testament Parallels, 2nd ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 224$.
4 Donald B. Redford, A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph, Genesis 37-50
(Leiden: Brill, 1970). The original may be a secular story from Mesopotamia on the art of divination.
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pothesis. Amos is almost pure bicameral speech, heard by an illiterate desert herdsman, and dictated to a scribe. In Ecclesiastes, in contrast, god is rarely mentioned, let alone ever speaking to its educated author. And even these mentions are considered by some scholars to be later interpolations, to allow this magnificent writing into the canon.
In Amos there are no words for mind or think or feel or understand or anything similar whatever 3 Amos never ponders anything in his heart; he can't; he would not know what it meant.
In the few times he refers to himself, he is abrupt and informative without qualification; he is no prophet, but a mere "gatherer of sycamore fruit"; he does not consciously think before he speaks; in fact, he does not think as we do at alclass="underline" his thought is done for him. He feels his bicameral voice about to speak and shushes those about him with a "Thus speaks the L o r d ! " and follows with an angry forceful speech which he probably does not understand himself.
Ecclesiastes is the opposite on all these points. He ponders things as deep in the paraphrands of his hypostatic heart as is possible. And who but a very subjective man could say, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," (1:2), or say that he sees that wisdom excels folly (2:13). One has to have an analog ‘I’ surveying a mind-space to so see. And the famous third chapter, " T o everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven
. . ." is precisely the spatialization of time, its spreading out in mind-space, so characteristic of consciousness as we saw in I.2.
Ecclesiastes thinks, considers, is constantly comparing one thing and another, and making brilliant metaphors as he does so.
Amos uses external divination, Ecclesiastes never. Amos is fiercely righteous, absolutely assured, nobly rude, speaking a blustering god-speech with the unconscious rhetoric of an Achilles or a Hammurabi. Ecclesiastes would be an excellent fireside friend, mellow, kindly, concerned, hesitant, surveying all of life in a way that would have been impossible for Amos.
These then are the extremes in the Old Testament. Similar
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comparisons can be made with other early and late books, or early and late parts of the same book, all revealing the same pattern, which is difficult to account for apart from the theory of the bicameral mind.
Some Observations on the Pentateuch
We are so used to the wonderful stories of the first five books specifically that it is almost impossible for us to see them freshly for what they are. Indeed, in trying to do so, whatever our religious backgrounds, we feel, if not blasphemous, at least disrespectful to the profoundest meanings of others. Such disrespect is certainly not my intention, but it is only by a cold unworshipful reading of these powerful pages that we can appreciate the magnitude of the mental struggle that followed the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
Why were these books put together? The first thing to realize is that the very motive behind their composition around Deuteronomy at this time was the nostalgic anguish for the lost bicamerality of a subjectively conscious people. This is what religion is.
And it was done just as the voice of Yahweh in particular was not being heard with any great clarity or frequency. Whatever their sources, the stories themselves, as they have been arranged, reflect human psychologies from the ninth century up to the fifth century B.C., the period during which there is progressively less and less bicamerality.
The Elohim. Another observation I would like to make concerns that very important word which governs the whole first chapter of Genesis, elohim. It is usually incorrectly translated in the singular as God. 'Elohim' is a plural form; it can be used collectively taking a, singular verb, or as a regular plural taking a plural verb. It comes from the root of 'to be powerful', and better translations of ‘elohim’ might be the great ones, the prominent ones, the majesties, the judges, the mighty ones, etc.
From the point of view of the present theory, it is clear that
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elohim is a general term referring to the voice-visions of the bicameral mind. The creation story of the first chapter of Genesis is thus a rationalization of the bicameral voices at the edge of subjectivity. "In the beginning the voices created heaven and earth." Taken as such, it becomes a more general myth that could have been indigenous to all of the ancient bicameral civilizations.
He-who-is, At the particular time in history that we pick up the story as the Pentateuch has put it together, there are only a few remaining elohim in contrast to the large number that probably previously existed. The most important is one recognized as Yahweh, which among several possibilities is most often translated as He-who-is.5 Evidently one particular group of the Khabiru, as the prophetic subjective age was approaching, was following only the voice of He-who-is, and rewrote the elohim creation story in a much warmer and more human way, making He-who-is the only real elohah. And this becomes the creation story as told from Genesis 2:4 et seq. And these two stories then interweave with other elements from other sources to form the first books of the Bible.