Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism

5. Five Steps toward Canonization: Tradition, Scripture, and the Origin of the Hebrew Bible

90 5 Five Steps toward Canonization Tradition, Scripture, and the Origin of the Hebrew Bible In chapter 4 I tried to place the rise of monotheism in Israel in the broader cultural and intellectual context of transformations that have traditionally been subsumed under the notion of an “Axial Age.” Moreover , I tried to place these “Axial” transformations in the context of primarily traumatic historical changes and experiences. In the present chapter I will explore another context that seems to me of equal relevance for those “Axial” transformations—especially with respect to the rise of monotheism, namely, the development of writing and literacy.1 It never occurred to Jaspers that his theory was based on ancient texts, and that without the use of writing for the codification and ensuing canonization of “transcendental visions,” the “Axial Age” could never have occurred. Writing is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for transformations of “Axial” magnitude and importance. Nor did it occur to students of monotheism that there is not a single monotheistic religion that is not based on a canon of holy writ.2 The history of media provides an equally important context for the emergence of monotheism as political history. Traditional “pagan” religions also have “sacred texts” whose sacredness rests in their power to create divine presence, the “third dimension” of the divine world, as explained in chapter 1. However, these are never collected into a canon that is simultaneously closed (i.e., excluding the addition of any new texts and the removal of any existing texts) and foundational in providing the basis for the entire life of the community and its individual members.3 Though I cannot claim any specific competence concerning biblical history and literature, I am interested in the history and phenomenology of canonization in the context of my theoretical work on “cultural memory.”4 In this context the textual history of the Hebrew Bible represents both a unique and extremely influential instance of the formation and transformation of a canonical tradition. Here one finds—perhaps for the first time in recorded history—a form of codifying cultural memory that changed our world in a most fundamental way, more than all the changes brought about by war or revolution. As was stated earlier, all of the so-called world religions are founded on an architecture of canonized scripture. There seems to exist a necessary connection between “revelation” and “canon,” between “secondary religions” (i.e., religions based on the distinction between true and false that reject every older and foreign tradition as falsehood or ignorance),5 and that specific form of written and highly normative codification of cultural memory called canonization. There is no secondary religion that is not based on a canonized body of scripture serving as a codification of memory. Belonging to such a religion means having learned and more or less internalized this memory recorded as text. It is, moreover, obvious that this preponderance of memory and codification is a necessary correlative of revelation. Revealed knowledge always is (or presents itself as) extraterrestrial, or extramundane. It comes from another world, like “air from other planets blowing,” to quote Stefan George. It is not knowledge based on thisworldly experience and accumulated in the course of centuries. Furthermore, it is knowledge that people are not encouraged to expand through their own experience. God is invisible: this is the first and foremost teaching of revealed monotheism. You are not going to see God; you depend on listening to his word in order to get close to him. The concept of revelation is the opposite of what can be called natural evidence. There is no other access to revealed truth other than through Scripture. “Nobody has ever seen God,” one reads in the Gospel of John (1:18; cf. First Epistle of John, 4:12, where this phrase is quoted), and Saint Paul teaches us “that we walk in faith and not in clear sight (or evidence)” (2 Cor. 5:7). Faith (Gk. pistis; Heb. emunah) is just another word for “memory,” for it is all about not forgetting what was said to the ancestors and about trusting the authenticity of their experience and testimony. The absence of exterior evidence is compensated for by an interior or spiritual representation, that is, memory and its codification in Scripture. This shift from external evidence to memory and Five Steps toward Canonization 91 internal trust or certainty has much to do with...