The Spirit within Me: Self and Agency in Ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism

Carol A. Newsom. The Spirit within Me: Self and Agency in Ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism. Yale University Press, 2021. 

Composed with the erudition and innovation characteristic of Carol Newsom’s scholarship, The Spirit within Me: Self and Agency in Ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism is an exciting voyage into perceptions of the self and moral agency in ancient Israelite and early Jewish literature. The study examines the multiple models of moral agency Newsom identifies in biblical and Second Temple literature and the history of their development. Particularly relevant to Newsom’s discussion of how models of moral agency changed in this period is the impact of the national trauma of the Babylonian destruction of Judah in 586 BCE. Newsom detects a significant increase in attention to the self as a moral agent in postexilic, Second Temple Jewish literature, born in large part from the belief that such catastrophe could only be attributed to abject moral failure. The first three chapters focus on some of the cultural models of the self and agency that appear in the literature of ancient Israel, while chapters four through six address shifts in Second Temple literature toward more introspective models of the self. 

Chapter one provides an introduction to the human self in Israelite culture that distinguishes between neurophysiological and cultural understandings. Noting the difficulties raised by earlier explorations of Israelite anthropology—such as the tendency to essentialize the somatic nature of the certain key terms (nepeš, bāśār, rúach, léb), even when their use is abstract, or correlate them predominantly with Greek philosophical concepts—Newsom proposes a recasting of the issues related to the representation of the self, based on a heuristic developed by William James in the late nineteenth century. Following James, Newsom differentiates “the self as subject of experience (‘I’) from the self as object of experience (‘Me’)” (p. 7). This “I-Me” heuristic is an important tool in subsequent chapters in which Newsom focuses primarily on “the ways in which changes in understandings of moral agency develop and become the vehicle for new models of the self and self-experience in Second Temple Judaism” (p. 14). 

In chapter two, the focus turns to the complexity of human moral agency represented in biblical narrative. Where or with whom does agency reside? Does it originate from a source external to the individual or is it conceptualized as something that comes from within? Newsom identifies in the narrative extending from Genesis 12 through 2 Kings 25 certain subtypes of agency, which she refers to as proxy agency (the actor can only succeed through the agency of another), divine co-agency (divine agency acts in concert with human agency), and unrecognized divine co-agency (divine agency directs the actions of a human agent who remains unaware). Divine co-agency is envisioned through the image of the divine rùaḥ as a substance “that is external but contiguous to the person” (p. 47). Examples include instances in which rùaḥ indicates exceptional abilities, skill, or knowledge in particular individuals (e.g., Joshua is described as “filled with the spirit of wisdom” in Deut 34:9). Particularly insightful in this part is Newsom’s observation that the preexilic literature shows little to no interest in the relation of rùaḥ to human moral agency. This, Newsom articulates, only appears later in postexilic and Second Temple Jewish religious literature. 

As the last of three chapters devoted to cultural models of the self and agency, chapter three is an engaging look into emerging notions of moral agency in the wisdom literature (especially Proverbs), Deuteronomy, and the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible. The attention is as much on the cognitive models that form in response to the Babylonian destruction as it is on the contents of the texts examined, and this is one of Newsom’s most remarkable contributions. By focusing on the frameworks of moral agency developed in the exilic and immediate postexilic periods, Newsom identifies new paradigms emerging to deal with the communal trauma of recent experiences. Where human moral agency has fallen short, divine intervention provides the needed resolution (e.g., Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Ezekiel), but does not eclipse a role for human agency. In Newsom’s analysis, Ezekiel stands apart in its radical critique of human moral agency and vision of transformation in which God responds to “the deep moral pollution of the people” by implanting in them a spirit “with the capacity for obedience” (pp. 78-79). This image of divine co-agency represents a transformation of earlier models of the self in its image of divine intervention in the human heart and its effect on the moral self. 

Chapter four marks a shift in focus from the communal models of the self and moral agency to more introspective models reflected in personal prayers and psalms that see the individual self as a moral agent. The failure of human moral agency in Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel allows for the development of what Newsom calls “self-alienation,” in which part of the self is “objectified in a manner that makes it repellent and fearful” (p. 82). This paves the way for the type of introspection and concern for the individual that begins to appear in Second Temple literature. One of the most interesting and, I think, significant contributions of the study appears in this chapter, in Newsom’s discussion of agency in predestinarian contexts. Drawing on insights gleaned from fiction writer Ted Chiang, Newsom considers the relationship between free will and predestination in the Two Spirits Teaching in 1QS 3:13-4:26. Newsom sees in the Two Spirits Teaching a belief that God’s plan for creation exists all at once, atemporally, before creation, and only comes to be experienced sequentially (and function as a teleology) with the act of creation. Knowledge of this predestination of events “does not remove [individuals] from the work of moral agency . . . but it shifts the nature of their participation” to the extent that through their actions they enact God’s predetermined plan (p. 113). In this development, the source of moral agency is found in God who works in concert with individuals who perform a plan that already exists in an atemporal frame. 

The placement of chapter five’s examination of Genesis 2-3 and its early interpretation reflects Newsom’s understanding of the text as a “product of early postexilic wisdom circles,” which seems to have gained prominence in the Hellenistic period (p. 116). According to Newsom, the text’s speculative (even skeptical) intellectual nature seems to have been misunderstood by many of its early interpreters. Though the narrative is really about crossing boundaries—humans become “like gods” in their acquisition of knowledge and so become a hybrid (no longer like animals), which creates a “disturbance to the natural order” (p. 123)—early interpreters misread the text, often framing it as an etiology of the human moral capacity to distinguish between good and evil (e.g., 4QInstruction; 4QMeditation). In 4QMeditation’s engagement with Genesis, there is an emerging sense that human physicality (the “fleshly spirit”) is depraved and incapable of behaving properly without divine intervention. Newsom’s treatment of early interpretations of Genesis 2-3 points to “the growing attention to the ontological abyss between the divine and the human” that associates human physicality with moral depravity (p. 175). 

As someone who is particularly interested in the beliefs and practices of the Qumran group, I could hardly wait to get to chapter six: The Hodayot of the Maskil and the Subjectivity of the Masochistic Sublime. Despite feeling the urge to jump ahead and read this chapter first, I’m glad I didn’t because this part of the study is really best understood and appreciated within the context of the preceding discussion. According to Newsom, central to the Hodayot is an understanding of the self that is “a radical interpretation of God’s creation of human beings in Genesis 2” (p. 143). In the Hodayot, the “I-Me” relationship is especially complex, reflecting a model of subjectivity in which the “I” voice calls into question “its very capacity and reliability . . . and then reestablishes itself within the prayer-poem” (p. 143). Building on her earlier work on the self as symbolic space, Newsom demonstrates the role of scriptural interpretation (esp. Gen 2-3 and Ezek 36) in the construction of a dual subjectivity that is aware it is simultaneously sinful and radically transformed (p. 165). Study of the “I” voice picks up on the scholarly fascination with the function of this subjective voice in a way that expands and illuminates Angela Kim Harkins’s work on the ritual performance of the Hodayot as a means of engendering a subjective experience for the performer. Through the re-creation and re-orientation of the self, the Hodayot create an experience of intimacy with God (having been given a new, holy spirit) that produces in the individual “a transformation so profound that it approaches divinization” (p. 143). Newsom’s observation here is similarly profound in its articulation of how the transformation is thought to affect the very nature of the human subject. With the incorporation of a new spirit and the new capacities for knowledge and moral agency that come with it, Newsom seems to envision the renewed individual as moving toward divinization or perhaps angelification, leaving room for the possibility that full divinization may in fact be the ultimate goal. The Hodayot, in Newsom’s analysis, represent the most striking development of the self as moral agent in the literature considered. In a radical departure from earlier models, in the Hodayot it is the divine spirit God places within certain humans that gives them special knowledge and the ability to act in accordance with the divine plan. 

Newsom humbly describes the present work as only a partial exploration of the self and human agency in antiquity due to the broad scope of the subject and complexity of the issues involved (p. x). While this may be a fair assessment in regard to the (still broad) range of material discussed, the significance of what Newsom accomplishes in this study cannot be overstated. In this examination of the self and moral agency in the literature of ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism, Newsom identifies the emergence of new cultural models of the self and shifting views of the role of human moral agency and its relationship to divine agency, subjects mostly unexplored prior to this study. The developments and shifts Newsom identifies reveal a general tendency toward more introspective models of the self and human agency in Second Temple literature, which seem to respond to the traumatic events of the Babylonian destruction with a transformed vision of the relationship between human and divine agency. In this innovative and deeply engaging study, Newsom sparks new ways of thinking about models of moral agency in biblical and early Jewish literature and paves the way for a broader application of the analysis that considers Jewish literature composed in Greek or the literature of other cultures. 

Rebecca Harris is Assistant Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Messiah University. She can be reached at Harris@messiah.edu or followed on Twitter @RHarrisPhDmom. 

[1] Ted Chiang. 2016. Stories of Your Life and Others. New York: Vintage Books. 

[2] William James. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. New York: H. Holt; idem. 1892. Psychology. New York: H. Holt.