AJR is pleased to publish remarks delivered as part of a book review panel at the annual meeting of the 2022 Society of Biblical Literature in Denver. The panel was organized by members of the Religious Experience in Antiquity steering committee chaired by Frederick S. Tappenden (St. Stephen’s College, University of Alberta). The book is Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena (De Gruyter 2022) by Reed Carlson and the panelists were: Jutta Jokiranta (University of Helsinki), David Lambert (University of North Carolina), Ingrid Lilly (Wofford College), and Ethan Schwartz (Villanova University).
The Critical Potential of Spirits: Hebrew Philology, the Poetics of Relation, and Unfamiliar Selves
Flying in the face of scholarship’s “hermeneutical exorcism,” Carlson tells ethnographic stories about people who experience spirit phenomena. Reading their stories has the potential to generate what Édouard Glissant calls the “poetics of relation.” Opportunities for renewed and reconnective perception and perspective-taking, Glissant’s poetics of relation are his key to the project of “transforming mentalities and reshaping societies.”
Possession and Relational Moral Agency
I think we rather need to compare how the modern conceptualizations of spirit possession are similar or dissimilar to the ones in biblical texts. To put it bluntly: We do not need to see what makes an angel in ethnographic data and how people describe angels in order to see which beings in biblical texts might qualify as angels. Rather, we may compare different angel conceptualizations and narratives.
Selves, Spirits, and the Usefulness of Comparison
Merely establishing the existence of “spirit” language in ancient Jewish texts, rather than identifying its particularity–the local realities with which it intersects and the specificity of the literary representations by which it is constituted–risks evaluating ancient Judaism from the standpoint of Christianity.
Jewish Spirits and Christian Specters
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.
Response to the Forum on Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible
by Reed Carlson
Unfamiliar Selves invites biblical studies to engage in broader discussions in the study of religion through comparison of our primary texts with ethnographic work on spirit possession practices across the world today.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Spirit possession is more commonly associated with late Second Temple Jewish literature and the New Testament than it is with the Hebrew Bible. In Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible, however, Reed Carlson argues that possession and other related spirit phenomena is indeed depicted in this earlier literature, though rarely according to the typical Western paradigm. This new approach utilizes theoretical models developed by cultural anthropologists and ethnographers of contemporary possession-practicing communities in the global south and its diasporas. Carlson demonstrates how possession in the Bible is a corporate and cultivated practice that can function as social commentary and as a means to model the moral self. Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible is a revision of the author’s dissertation completed at Harvard University, which was awarded the 2021 Manfred Lautenschlaeger award for Theological Promise.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Rev. Dr. Reed Carlson is a scholar of religion, specializing in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. He is an Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at United Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia and Gettysburg, PA and an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. An overarching goal of his research is engaging the fraught hermeneutical issues involved in critically examining ancient and modern accounts of religious experience. His published work includes studies on spirit possession, apocalyptic expectation, and Jewish-Christian relations.