Models of the Moral Self: Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism

The great sage and scribe Jesus Ben Sira was, for the most part, a writer in confident control of his message, one who seldom engaged in direct polemics with other points of view. On occasion, however, his irritation with claims that he finds wrong-headed comes sharply into view. One of these moments is in ch. 15 of the Wisdom of Ben Sira, where the sage stoutly objects to those who—as he characterizes them—claim that it is God’s fault that they have sinned. In response, Ben Sira mounts a vigorous defense of the Deuteronomic view of moral agency, in which persons have free will and the unimpeded capacity to choose between “life and death” (Sir 15:15–17). It is difficult to know who Ben Sira’s opponents actually were, because it is unlikely that he gives a fair representation of their position in the whiny words he attributes to them, “It was the Lord’s doing that I fell away. . . . It was he who led me astray” (15:11–12). In some ways the position sounds closest to the moral anthropology articulated three hundred years later in the book of 4 Ezra. There Ezra sharply questions the model of free human agency and attributes the moral failure of the vast majority of persons to the “evil heart” with which humans were created, and which God did not act to remove or correct. While we do not know if the argument that Ezra makes had already been developed by contemporaries of Ben Sira, ample evidence exists for the emergence of a variety of often startling alternatives to the Deuteronomic model of moral agency in various strands of Second Temple Jewish literature.

Curiously, although interest in models of moral psychology has been lively in NT studies, especially as focused on the figure of Paul, this topic has been rather neglected by Hebrew Bible and Second Temple scholars, though a revival of interest in biblical anthropology in general—especially among German-speaking scholars—suggests that interest in this subject may be rising.¹ In other disciplines, the “self”—moral and otherwise—has become a subject of intense research in fields as diverse as neuroscience, cultural history, philosophy, theology, psychology, and anthropology. If biblical studies were to reinvigorate its own examination of the self constructed in the Hebrew Bible and early Judaism, which of these fields might provide helpful conversation partners? And what might our field contribute to an interdisciplinary conversation?

Among the different disciplines, neuroscience and anthropology offer particularly useful insights. What makes neuroscience intriguing is its finding that the anatomical structures of the brain responsible for the sense of self are also the ones involved in religious experience. The claim, made most forcefully by Patrick McNamara in The Neuroscience of Religious Experience,² is that religion and the self co-evolved and that religion is the most important of the cultural means by which a unified or executive self—what can also be described as conscious agency—is constructed and maintained. Because neuroscience is based on the anatomy and chemistry of the brain, it can identify what features and processes of the self are universal. One of the things it reveals is that the default state of consciousness is fragmented and conflicted. Different physiologically and genetically based systems, as well as acquired beliefs and preferences, compete within the person, leading to an unsystematic and uncoordinated series of impulses and desires.³ The executive self that mediates among these impulses and allows the person to act with coordinated intention over time does not simply emerge biologically by default. It is much more a cultural achievement, historically facilitated and transmitted in large part by religious practices.⁴

Because the self is culturally constructed on an anatomical substructure, remarkably diverse ways exist for achieving the executive self required for human flourishing. Here is where anthropology is helpful, particularly that branch often called “ethnopsychology.” In ethnopsychology, anthropologists investigate “local theories of the person”⁵ or “indigenous psychologies,”⁶ that is, symbolic accounts of how the self is constituted in diverse cultures. Most...