Other elohim are occasionally mentioned throughout the older parts of the Old Testament. The most important of them is Ba'al, usually translated as the Owner. In the Canaan of the times, there were many Owners, one to each village, in the same way that many Catholic cities today have their own Virgin Marys, and yet they are all the same one.
5 The derivation of Exodus 3: 14, that Yahweh means I AM T H A T I AM , is regarded by most scholars as folk etymology, as if somebody should claim that the derivation of Manhattan came from a man on the island with a hat on. More serious scholarship traces the name back to an epithet, such as he who casts down or the Downcaster. But the sense of the majority, including- the Septuagint and Latin Vulgate, seems to be more in line with He-who-is. Cf. William Gesenius, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, E. Robinson, trans., F. Brown, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 218. I must ask the forbearance of professional'
scholars for my inconsistency in straining for the English here while keeping other terms such as elohim and nabi in the Hebrew. My purpose is the defamiliarization which I feel is essential for my main point.
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Paradise Lost. A further observation could be made upon the story of the Fall and how it is possible to look upon it as a myth of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The Hebrew arum> meaning crafty or deceitful, surely a conscious subjective word, is only used three or four times throughout the entire Old Testament. It is here used to describe the source of the temptation. The ability to deceive, we remember, is one of the hallmarks of consciousness. The serpent promises that "you shall be like the elohim themselves, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5), qualities that only subjective conscious man is capable of. And when these first humans had eaten of the tree of knowledge, suddenly "the eyes of them both were opened," their analog eyes in their metaphored mind-space, "and they knew that they were naked" (Genesis 3:7), or had autoscopic visions and were narratizing, seeing themselves as others see them.6 And so is their sorrow "greatly multipled" (Genesis 3:16) and they are cast out from the garden where He-who-is could be seen and talked with like another man.
As a narratization of the breakdown of the bicameral mind and the coming of consciousness, the story should be rationalistically contrasted with the Odyssey as discussed in the previous chapter.
But the problems are similar, as is the awe we should feel toward its unknown composition.
The Nabiim who naba. The Hebrew word nabi,7 which has been misleadingly translated by the Greek designation of
'prophet', presents an extremely interesting difficulty. To prophesy in its modern connotations is to foretell the future, but this is not what is indicated by the verb naba, whose practitioners were the nabiim (plural of nabi). These terms come from a group of cognate words which have nothing to do with time, but rather 6 It is interesting in this connection to read Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I:2 .
7 Transliteration from Hebrew into English is always misleading. Perhaps a better case here might be made for nbi or nvi. That its meaning was ambiguous even at the time seems to be indicated in I Samuel 9:9. See also John L. McKenzie, A Theology of the Old Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1974), p. 85.
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with flowing and becoming bright. Thus we may think of a nabi as one who metaphorically was flowing forth or welling up with speech and visions. They were transitional men, partly subjective and partly bicameral. And once the bright torrent was released and the call came, the nabi must deliver his bicameral message, however unsuspecting (Amos 7:14-15), however un-worthy the nabi felt (Exodus 3:113 Isaiah 6; Jeremiah 1:6), however distrustful at times of his own hearing (Jeremiah 20:7-10). What does it feel like to be a nabi at the beginning of one of his bicameral periods? Like a red hot coal in one's mouth (Isaiah 6:7) or a raging fire shut up in one's bones that cannot be contained (Jeremiah 20:9) and that only the flowing forth of divine speech can quench.
The story of the nabiim can be told in two ways. One is external, tracing out their early role and the acceptance of their leadership to their massacre and total suppression in about the fourth century B.C. But as evidence for the theory in this book, it is more instructive to look at the matter from the internal point of view, the changes in the bicameral experience itself. These changes are: the gradual loss of the visual component, the growing inconsistency of the voices in different persons, and the increasing inconsistency within the same person, until the voices of the elohim vanish from history. I shall take each of these up in turn.
The Loss of the Visual Component
In the true bicameral period, there was usually a visual component to the hallucinated voice, either itself hallucinated or as the statue in front of which one listened. The quality and frequency of the visual component certainly varied from one culture to another, as can be indicated by the presence of hallucinogenic statuary in some cultures and not in others.
If only because its sources are so chronologically diverse, it is
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somewhat astonishing to find the Pentateuch consistently and successively describing the loss of this visual component. In the beginning, He-who-is is a visual physical presence, the duplicate of his creation. He walks in his garden at the cool of the day, talking to his recent creation, Adam. He is present and visible at the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, shuts the door of Noah's Ark with his own hand, speaks with Abraham at Sichem, Bethel, and Hebron, and scuffles all night with Jacob like a hoodlum.
But by the time of Moses, the visual component is very different. Only in a single instance does Moses speak with He-who-is
"face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend" (Exodus 33:11).
And another time, there is a group hallucination when Moses and the seventy elders all see He-who-is at a distance standing on sapphire pavement (Exodus 24:9-10). But in all the other instances, the hallucinated meetings are less intimate. Visually, He-who-is is a burning bush, or a cloud, or a huge pillar of fire. And as visually the bicameral experience recedes into the thick darkness, where thunders and lightnings and driving clouds of dense blackness crowd in on the inaccessible heights of Sinai, we are approaching the greatest teaching of the entire Old Testament, that, as this last of the elohim loses his hallucinatory properties, and is no longer an inaccessible voice in the nervous system of a few semi-bicameral men, and becomes something written upon tablets, he becomes law, something unchanging, approachable by all, something relating to all men equally, king and shepherd, universal and transcendent.
Moses himself reacts to this loss of the visual quality by hiding his face from a supposed brilliance. At other times, his bicameral voice itself rationalizes the loss of its visual hallucinatory components by saying to Moses, "No man shall see me and live . . . I will put thee in a cleft of rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: and I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts, but my face shall not be seen" (Exodus 33:20-23).
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