1st Edition
Early Israel Cultic Praxis, God, and the Sôd Hypothesis
Early Israel offers the most sweeping reinterpretation of the Pentateuch since the nineteenth-century Documentary Hypothesis. Engaging a dozen-plus modern academic disciplines—from anthropology, biblical studies, Egyptology and semiotics, to linguistics, cognitive poetics and consciousness studies; from religious studies, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis and literary criticism, to mysticism studies, cognitive psychology, phenomenology and philosophy of mind—it wrests from the Pentateuch an outline of the heretofore undiscovered ancient Israelite mystical-initiatory tradition of the First Temple priests. The book effectively launches a new research area: Pentateuchal esoteric mysticism, akin to a "center" or "organizing principle" discussed in biblical theology. The recovered priestly system is discordant vis-à-vis the much-later rabbinical project. This volume appeals to a diverse academic community, from Biblical and Jewish studies to literary studies, religious studies, anthropology, and consciousness studies.
Introduction: The TEXT Part 1: The CONTEXT 1. The God of Moses versus the "One and All" of Egypt: From the Magic of Hypostatized Spirituality (Egypt) to the Discriminating Paradigm of Non-Idolatry (Israel) 2. At the Primal Scene of Communication: The Question of Israel’s Esoteric Referent 3. On the Notion of the Sôd: YHWH’s Garden versus the Rabbinical Orchard Part 2: The METATEXT 4. Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System: Accessing the Torah’s Veiled Axis of Communication 5. The Sôd as Poiesis: Probing the Sôd’s Poietic-Tropological Structure and Multiscalar Power Dynamics 6. A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch: Israel’s Universe of Discourse; a Replica of the Torah; Acquiring an Apposite Research Method Part 3: The URTEXT 7. The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier: Retrieving the Torah within the Scripture 8. Israel’s Noematic Signified: Reverse-Engineering the Pentateuchal Deific Numinous 9. The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel: Recovering the Esoteric Referent of Ancient Israelite Initiatory Praxis Part 4: The CODE-TEXT 10. Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable: Complex Tropological Entextualization Strategies for the Pentateuchal Numinous 11. In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis: The Conundrum of the Eleventh Commandment, Eden’s Theater of Ruptured Doxa and Fractured Epistêmê, and Emergence of "Megaphor" 12. Postscript: The HORS-TEXTE
Biography
Alex S. Kohav teaches at the Department of Philosophy, Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the editor of two recent anthologies, Mysticism and Meaning: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Three Pines Press, 2019) and Mysticism and Experience: Twenty-First Century Approaches (Lexington Books, 2020), and a co-editor of A Paradise of Paradoxes: Finite Infinities, the Hebrew God, and Taboo of Knowledge (in preparation). Dr. Kohav is engaged in the long-term project of developing ancient Israelite philosophy—the foundational Hebraic/Jewish metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and ethics of early-antiquity Israel. His forthcoming book, Adam, a Kind of Thinker: Freedom Scales as Selves, Worlds, and Thinking Fields (Hebraic Pluri-Dimensional Perspectives) elaborates an ontology of "worlds" accessible to human beings.
"[Early Israel] is a bold, panoptic book that draws from many fields of knowledge, ancient and modern, in order to offer a startling esoteric understanding of Torah, one that leads us to seek a recovery of Eden, not as a place, but as a state of mind. In its sheer reach and in its fascinating corridors, Alex Kohav’s book has the potential to change everyone who reads it."
Kevin Hart, The University of Virginia, author of The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
"Kohav’s magisterial volume envelopes the reader with a breathtaking array of disciplines: diverse intellectual and spiritual shovels are put at our disposal with which to dig deeply beneath the biblical text. The intense process of digging is one of being led along a path through a wilderness that is at once a dense forest and a clear-aired desert. The path is toward an unexpected garden of unearthly delights whose myriad blossoms grow from roots that are Hebrew and Greek; ancient and contemporary; Socratic and Husserlian—and are compelling in their strange beauty."
Ori Z. Soltes, Center for Jewish Civilization, Georgetown University, author of Magic and Religion in the Greco-Roman World: The Beginnings of Judaism and Christianity (Academia-West Press, 2020)
"Alex Shalom Kohav argues that much of scholarship on the Torah and the Pentateuch is driven by mistaken methodologies and misapplied theoretical constructs, including inadequate theories of language and communication, misapplied theories of textual interpretation, and overly literal readings of complex mystical texts. The texts operate on two channels: a literal channel intended for the average person, and a mystical Sôd channel. Stories such as those of Jacob and Joseph can be interpreted as inspirational narratives but can also be construed as instructions for profound personal transformation, and were understood as such by the ancient Israelite priests. Kohav’s revisiting of the ancient text shows that deeply ineffable, but profoundly transformative experiences of divinity are accessible through the Sôd channel of the Hebrew scriptures."
Laura E. Weed, Dept. of Philosophy, The College of Saint Rose, author of Structure of Thinking: A Process-oriented Account of Mind (Imprint Academic, 2003)
"Alex Kohav’s book is a magnum opus in the fullest sense of this term. Filled with a wealth of information, textual analysis, and data from comparative religion studies, it offers an original view of the Pentateuch, focusing on the notion of Eden as an experiential state of being rather than merely a mythical narrative. Taking its cue from Rudolf Otto’s classic study of the numen, the book links its analysis of the Biblical text with the psychological experience of the numinous and the sublime. This highly informative and original work will appeal to religious scholars, historians, and anybody interested in Jewish studies and history of religion."
Elana Gomel, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, author of Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (Routledge, 2014)
