For more in the review panel on Reed Carlson, Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena, click here.
Reed Carlson’s Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena might appear at first glance to be a typical entry in one of the most well-worn genres in our field: “biblical studies dissertation published with light revisions by a German press.” To be sure, it has many of the usual strengths of that genre. It is focused in its content, rigorous in its analysis, and meticulous in its organization. Yet it also breaks from the expectations for such a book in refreshing and exciting ways. The most obvious is Carlson’s thoroughgoing, substantive engagement with anthropological accounts of contemporary spirit phenomena. He draws on this literature in order to open up new paradigms for understanding depictions of spirit phenomena in ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism. In so doing, he implicitly articulates a compelling version of what historical-critical analysis might look like when it engages the experiences of the Global South. Moreover, these comparisons afford the opportunity to begin each chapter with vignettes of non-biblical, non-ancient spirit phenomena. This makes the book genuinely readable—no small feat for a serious academic volume.
More can and should be said about this intervention. For the purposes of my comments here, however, I would like to focus on a different aspect of Carlson’s book that also defies expectations for this sort of study: its explicit, self-aware contention with Christian supersessionist discourses. In his introduction, Carlson notes that studies of spirit phenomena in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple literature have tended to adopt a teleological framework in which these texts are mined for how they lay the groundwork for what the interpreters are really after: the later New Testament idea of the Holy Spirit. In some cases, these studies have denigrated both the canonical Hebrew Bible and extracanonical Second Temple literature, presenting them as equally pneumatically impoverished. Other studies have adopted the classic perspective of such foundational figures as Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, in which the pneumatic sublimity of the older strata of the Bible descended into the spiritual deadness of Spätjudentum—destined to be resurrected (not to put too fine a point on it) by Christ. It is frankly hard to decide which of these two options is worse. In any case, if the word “spirit” conjures up associations with the ghostly and the apparitional, then it is perhaps appropriate to put it like this: the study of ancient Jewish spirit phenomena has long been “haunted” by the specter of its early Christian successors.
Carlson’s introduction reviews these trends, as would any responsible survey of previous literature on the topic. What interests me, however, is how Carlson concludes this discussion:
The mistakes I have critiqued in this section have been perpetrated most often by Christians writing about pre-Christian literature. Thus, I must acknowledge that I write as an ordained Christian minister myself. While I do believe that Christian theologians can and should read the Old Testament with particular pneumatological aims, I also believe that this can be done without mischaracterizing spirit phenomena in early Jewish texts as nonexistent, fringe, or half-baked. Such characterizations are not only inaccurate with respect to the literature and to history; they are also dangerous. (15)
Many readers will chalk this up to a Christian mea culpa and read right past it. Yet it is actually much more nuanced and consequential than that. Carlson does not simply say “supersessionism is bad” (though he certainly thinks so). Instead, he takes ownership, as a Christian, over that problematic discourse. He criticizes supersessionism from the inside while also—and this is the crucial part—affirming the basic project that has given rise to it: in his words, “read[ing] the Old Testament with particular pneumatological aims”—or, as I would put it, reading the Old Testament as a Christian. Carlson is committed to this project and also committed to countering some of its most poisonous fruits—all without compromising the historical or philological rigor of his scholarship.
For anyone who knows Carlson, this is not surprising. For many years now, he has distinguished himself as a Christian scholar of the Bible who mobilizes biblical studies to challenge Christian anti-Judaism. He pursued his doctoral training with Jon D. Levenson, one of the eminent Jewish Bible scholars of our day. (Full disclosure: I also trained with Levenson alongside Carlson.) He has published at the highest level on classical rabbinic interpretation of biblical texts. He teaches against Christian anti-Judaism in his seminary classroom—something to which I can personally attest, having served as a guest speaker in several of his courses over the better part of the last decade. It would therefore be both easy and justified to offer an effusively positive review of Carlson’s book along these lines. However, as we all know, effusively positive reviews tend to do little to advance the discussion. So, with all due respect to my esteemed colleague, I would like to take a different route. I would like to highlight a few ways in which, in my opinion, Carlson runs into some challenges in his effort to present ancient Jewish spirit phenomena apart from the regnant Christian anti-Jewish framing of this material. Let me be clear that these challenges do not constitute failures on Carlson’s part. Rather, they point up the sheer difficulty of the task that he has so admirably set for himself. My hope is that discussing this difficulty may serve as a productive opening to a broader consideration of what it means to contest the anti-Jewish legacies that continue to shape our field.
My first question for Carlson concerns how he presents and organizes the data. When I was trying to characterize this, I found myself reaching for geographic or topographic metaphors: “mapping the landscape of spirit phenomena in the Hebrew Bible” is the one on which I ultimately settled. My inclination toward spatial language is, I think, telling. Time is not a major feature in Carlson’s book; his approach is decidedly synchronic rather than diachronic. There are a few exceptions, such as his tracing (with help from Anja Klein’s work) the chain of influence through Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Psalm 51, and the Community Rule. On the whole, however, his concern is to give a full picture of the spirit phenomena that appear in the Hebrew Bible. He does not try to show how these phenomena changed over time. This might give the impression that Carlson is simply punting on diachronic analysis. However, the reality is more complicated. As we have already seen, Carlson notes that diachronic thinking is at the center of the anti-Jewish thrust in the past study of biblical spirit phenomena: i.e., the effort to plot the changes in these phenomena en route to the telos of the Christian Holy Spirit. Carlson’s decision to set aside diachronic questions is therefore a foundational part of his rebuke to these problematic trends. Biblical and ancient Jewish conceptions of spirit are worthy of study in their own right, without regard for what they might have eventually become.
While I appreciate Carlson’s impulse here, I also worry that it backs him into a corner. Ideas of spirit did change—substantially, in fact—across the millennium-plus during which the literature of the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism was written. A diachronic approach is necessary for a full, nuanced understanding of this topic. If we deem such an approach radioactive simply because of its historical association with supersessionism, then we are actually still letting supersessionism dictate the terms of the analysis in a roundabout way. Carlson might respond to this critique by pointing out that he is operating within a Continental European composition-historical paradigm that situates much of this literature relatively late and sees it as the product of more thoroughgoing, homogenizing redactional intervention. In this paradigm, he might argue, looking for diachronic development makes less sense. In that case, however, I would want to see evidence that Second Temple scribes were centering and thematizing spirit in such a way that they would indeed have homogenized it in the course of their redactional work. I do not believe that Carlson provides such evidence.
My second concern is related to the first. The phrase “Hebrew Bible” is what appears in the title of this book, and most of the data indeed come from that canonical collection. However, in the introduction, Carlson clarifies that he does not draw a firm historical distinction between the Hebrew Bible and extracanonical Second Temple literature. Instead, he approaches them as parts of a larger, integrated cultural complex—as advocated in the work of numerous scholars over the past couple of decades. However, there is one exemplar of Second Temple Jewish literature that is conspicuously absent from Carlson’s book: the New Testament. As with the issue of synchrony versus diachrony, this omission makes good sense. After all, it is the New Testament that so many scholars have problematically positioned as the telos to which pre-Christian spirit phenomena point. Tabling it is another way that Carlson refuses to let Christian texts and categories set the terms of the discussion.
I do worry that setting the New Testament aside in this manner might have the ironic effect of further reifying its “specialness.” However, there is an even more pressing problem here—and it once again concerns diachrony: spirit phenomena in the New Testament are historically and culturally much closer to some Hebrew spirit phenomena than some Hebrew spirit phenomena are to each other. As an example, let us take the following three texts: Genesis 6, where YHWH says that his rûaḥ shall not abide in humanity forever; Ecclesiastes, where Qohelet says that human beings and animals have the same rûaḥ; and the so-called Treatise on the Two Spirits from the Qumran Community Rule (1QS 3:13–4:26), which discusses the two rûḥôt that God set for humanity. Carlson considers all three of these texts in his book. However, it is almost certainly the case that Ecclesiastes and 1QS are historically closer to the New Testament than they are to Genesis 6. What, then, is the basis for comparing these three but excluding the New Testament? That basis, it seems to me, is not historical but hermeneutical and cultural: the effort to resist the supersessionism that the New Testament might inevitably bring into the picture. While I emphasize once again that this is a laudatory goal, I nevertheless feel that it runs the risk of producing a historical flattening—one that still basically lines up along the old canonical categories anyway. Once more, we see how these canonical categories reassert themselves through the very process of trying to overcome or to avoid them.
The third and final issue I want to raise is the one that I find the most interesting—and also the one that I suspect will be the most controversial. As we have seen, Carlson wants to study biblical and ancient Jewish spirit phenomena apart from a Christian framing. Yet I cannot help but wonder: Might it be the case that his interest in biblical and ancient Jewish spirit phenomena already assumes and constitutes a Christian framing? I am a Jewish Bible scholar, and, to put it bluntly, it is difficult for me to imagine a Jewish Bible scholar ever writing this book. It is difficult for me to imagine a Jewish Bible scholar seeing “spirit” as a determinative throughline in the Hebrew Bible in quite the way that Carlson does. I even had the privilege of being in dialogue with Carlson as he wrote this book, and I have to say: I have never heard about or talked about “spirit” so much in my life! Indeed, in the introduction to the book, when Carlson surveys his primary interlocutors in recent scholarship on ancient spirit phenomena, they are overwhelmingly Christian. This seems telling to me.
Now, I recognize that it is risky to make essentialist claims about what constitutes a “Jewish” approach, especially based on my own personal intuitions. Therefore, I would like to provide a concrete example that is suggestive of the dynamic that I am detecting. One important text in Carlson’s book that I also spend a great deal of time with in my own work is Ezekiel’s stirring depiction of Israel’s national, spiritual transformation: “I [i.e., YHWH] will give you a new heart and put a new spirit (rûaḥ) into you; I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:26). Not surprisingly, Carlson trains his attention on what conceptual work the word rûaḥ is doing here. For my part, however, I am much more interested in the use of ritual purification imagery that directly precedes this spiritual transformation: “I will sprinkle purifying water upon you and you shall be purified; from all your impurities and from all your filth I will purify you” (Ezek 36:25). From my perspective, this verse is the most interesting part of the passage—and Carlson does not even cite it!
This divergence seemed noteworthy to me, so I took a look at some important classic and recent scholarship (commentaries and monographs, in this case) on Ezekiel by both Jewish scholars (e.g., Tova Ganzel, Moshe Greenberg) and Christian scholars (e.g., Joseph Blenkinsopp, Walther Eichrodt, Jacqueline Lapsley, and Walther Zimmerli). I found that, on the one hand, my own focus seemed to reflect a broader Jewish trend: Ezekiel’s priestly purification language received more attention. On the other hand, Carlson’s focus seemed to reflect a broader Christian trend: Ezekiel’s pneumatic language received more attention. I hasten to emphasize that we should not make too much of this anecdote. For one, my investigation was hardly exhaustive. Moreover, many of today’s most influential scholars of P and Israelite ritual are Christian. Nevertheless, this example suggests to me that we should turn a critical lens on more than just the question of how religion has shaped the study of certain biblical topics. We should also critically examine the question of how religion has shaped our own individual interests in studying certain biblical topics in the first place. Maybe Carlson, as a Christian scholar, is drawn to the project of dismantling supersessionist understandings of biblical spirit phenomena because the New Testament emphasis on the Holy Spirit has conditioned him to see biblical spirit phenomena as an animating concern. Maybe I, as a Jewish scholar, am not especially interested in biblical spirit phenomena one way or another because (obviously?) the New Testament emphasis on the Holy Spirit has not conditioned me in the same way.
In opening these reflections, I summarized Carlson’s approach to the history of scholarship on his topic by framing it in terms of the topic itself: the specter of Christianity, so to speak, has haunted the study of ancient Jewish spirit phenomena. Ultimately, what I have tried to draw out in this review is that even as Carlson endeavors to banish the ghost, he himself is still haunted by it. Christianity is a subtler, quieter apparition in this book than it is in much past scholarship on the topic—but it lurks nevertheless, going bump in the night and thereby shaping the discussion in implicit ways. I want to be clear once again that this does not compromise the value of Carlson’s scholarly contribution. This book is a crucial entry in the study of biblical spirit phenomena. I am confident that it will play a prominent role in future work on the topic. Yet in some ways, what I want to suggest is that the most significant and wide-ranging contribution of Carlson’s book is how he invites us to think about what it means to contend with problematic intellectual-historical genealogies in the discipline—even, and perhaps especially, when those contentions are messy and not entirely successful. Our field might well never be able to banish its supersessionist ghosts. But we can learn to live with them, to be less frightened of them, and maybe even, every once in a while, to pull the white sheets off of them and get a glimpse at what they really are underneath. In Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible, Carlson has compellingly modeled how we may do so.
Ethan Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Villanova University.