For more in the review panel on Reed Carlson, Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena, click here.
It hardly needs repeating that Hebrew philology and historical criticism have functioned as related projects since academic paradigms for both emerged in the 19th century. Over the last ten years, biblical philologists have developed another critical lens by examining the historical development of philological scholarship.[1] Joining a conversation that began at the turn of the millennium, biblical scholars are writing much needed scrutiny of the field, exposing especially the problematics of historical criticism.[2] Two decades of scrutiny have contributed to a widening of the publishing field to diverse projects, values, and methods in biblical studies. But trailing far behind, material support for marginalized scholars is not so much more equitably distributed as slightly less inequitably distributed. Tremendous financial and institutional structures remain in place that authorize the historical and philological methods for studying the “biblical” past. Indeed, critical biblical studies is still academically credentialed in the U.S. and Europe primarily by its knowledge of ancient languages and its historicist modes of scholarship. If Peter Berger is correct that “every institution must have a correlate in consciousness,”[3] the institutional durability of this historical/philological field in biblical scholarship must surely be animated by specific and namable forms of epistemic, cognitive, aesthetic, and political practice.
Reed Carlson’s book, Unfamiliar Selves, is hardly confrontational about its implications for Hebrew philology. And yet, in my view, Carlson’s philological project of comparative anthropology enters the inner-chambers of an academic assemblage where biblical philology has often figured as an unbiased epistemological practice that forms the lower-critical foundation for studying history and practicing historical criticism. These values are rather strange when you think about it: do objectivity and unbiased perception really best characterize communication in zones of language contact?
Languages are deeply patterned, so in theory, philologists can conduct methodical linguistic analysis, like the data-driven methods of frame semantics theory that are now so popular in biblical studies.[4] Biblical textual critics tend to imbue philology with an aura of objectivity claiming authority like that enjoyed by the hard sciences.[5] But quantitative methods and data analysis could never attend to all factors that characterize language in the lived world, like code-switching where subjects select and transform aspects of language(s) in context[6] or like other modalities of semiosis where performances and communications of meaning are more than just linguistic. And in reality, biblical philologists cannot enact the objectivism of methodical, “scientific” linguistic studies. Modern sentiments, values, and categories routinely inform philological arguments with what Jacqueline Vayntrub, Laura Quick, and I noted as philology’s most frequent final arbiter: common sense.[7] But who’s common sense? The claim to practice philology in a mode of scientific consciousness obscures the inscription and reproduction of modern sensibilities and values onto history’s languages and texts. As Carsten Ziegert recently pointed out, even frame semantics require familiarity with lived worlds. Philologists must frame words with “prototypical situations,” many of which, as Carsten concedes, “are highly culture-dependent” and must “mirror the cognitive reality of the original language users.”[8] But I think, too, of the extreme heritage Bruce Lincoln presents in his book on myth, ideology, and scholarship: the pernicious, horrendous, brutal imaginaries that Aryan projects of philology in the 19th century projected into the language of ancient myths.[9] Lincoln’s account helps explain why the philology of ancient religious texts was radically reshaped into a systematic field of knowledge. But as Penelope Gardner-Chloros observes about code-switching, “overall we are faced with a degree of [language] variation which no single set of grammatical rules can account for.”[10] In (rightly) rejecting the 19th century’s comparative philology, philological scholarship (at least biblical philological scholarship), may have done so for the absolutely wrong reasons. Lincoln describes how the philology that followed focused its critique on its predecessor’s unrestrained and superficial methods, but far more is at stake than method. It is the dehumanization that needed to be critiqued and repaired. It is worth pausing to note that the 19th century Aryan philologists were among the so-called pioneers of anthropological philology, moving away from what Lincoln calls myth-based philology. The legacy of their brutal “comparative” scholarship included the academic abandonment of persons over preference for method. Instead of tending to the many known and unknown grave-sites imbricated in history of biblical philology, the academic desire for scientific consciousness in linguistic method severed language from anthropological models and its more contemporary models in socio-cultural linguistics.[11] In short, biblical philology has abandoned and betrayed a vast array of humanizing approaches to language. It is probably not accidental that the philologist’s own humanity or positionality is only occasionally made explicit.
To return to Bruce Lincoln’s account of myth, philology, and scholarship, Lincoln concludes his book by calling for scrutiny of one’s own scholarly work:
As students of myth, we can turn our attention to the mythmaking of our scholarly, as well as that of other, ancestors, secure in the knowledge that our descendants will one day return us the favor. In short – the [academic] story I would tell…is one that recalibrates categories and redistributes privilege, encouraging a move away from projects of “reconstruction” and towards those of criticism.[12]
Perhaps the study of spirits seems like an ironic way to recover projects of criticism. But reading the ancient textualization of spirits with Unfamiliar Selves invites a double excavation by which academic consciousness is also under scrutiny. Because as Carlson suggests on page after page of his important project, it is clear that neither data-driven semantics nor modern sentiments about the “norms” of human experience can do justice to the language that animates the Hebrew Bible’s textualized landscape of spirits. Right from the start, Carlson presents the familiar challenges ruaḥ presents (with notable clarity, I might add): All modern English lexicons for ruaḥ assume multiple discrete semantic categories: spirit, breath, wind.[13] These categories are reflective of modern domains: self, body, and environment, respectively. Instead, ruaḥ emerges from antiquity as an unfamiliar, differently textured domain of discourses about ancient selves consisting in what may seem like plural notions of a person’s materiality, agency, and subjectivity.[14] Such interrogations of category lead Carlson to propose a person-relational scheme for modern historians who want to conceptualize ruaḥ. He describes spirit language in light of ongoing vs. temporary experiences of spirit phenomena, i.e., spirits that abide vs. spirits that migrate.[15] By the end of the book, one arrives at Carlson’s thesis about spirit idioms after a conceptual progression that builds across the chapters: the abiding/familiar and migrating/unfamiliar world of spirits we saw in DtrH and prophetic narratives (especially) come to function as medical/therapeutic/disability discourses of individual (especially moral) transformation.
Although previous studies have made use of comparative ethnographies of spirit possession, like Robert Wilson’s Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (1980), a distinctive feature of Carlson’s project is the critical interrogation of scholarship he invites with its received categories of selfhood and “sense for the norms” of human experience. Indeed, Unfamiliar Selves has brought much needed, heretofore uncommon perspectives to a philological study of persons and spirits.[16] This is best captured when Carlson pays tribute to Janice Boddy, a prolific ethnographer who lived and studied in Sudanese Muslim villages with women who practice the quite widespread healing practices of zâr possession. To quote Carlson,
[Boddy] demonstrated that spirit possession rarely fits neatly into Western scholarly categories like ‘medicine,’ ‘psychology,’ or ‘religion’ … At the conclusion of her article, Boddy turned the microscope around on these scholars and suggested that the question in possession studies had shifted from, ‘How is it that other peoples believe the self to be permeable by forces from without?’ to ‘How is it that Western models have repeatedly denied such permeability?’[17]
This question about Western persons is important. People who identify as Western are working with a heritage of conceptions about personhood that is trenchantly resistant to permeability and foreign agencies. Recently, Annette Yoshiko Reed put her finger on the meta-critical potential of spirits for scholars working in the epistemological heritage of the Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment. Reed’s book on ancient Jewish angels and demons, published in 2020, is worth quoting at length:
The angelology and demonology of this literature, as we shall see, cut across some of the most definitive partitions within post-Enlightenment Western orders of knowledge. Its demons and angels are “supernatural” insofar as they participate in unseen realms above or beyond our own, but they are “natural” insofar as they are given a causal role in the visible cycles of the cosmos or in the human mind and body. Its treatments of such spirits can be called “religious” insofar as some impinge on ethics, piety, salvation, and beliefs about the divine; “magical” in the sense that some can be manipulated by rite or speech to flee or protect an individual; and “scientific” insofar as some fit into a regular system of cosmic structures and movements. To attend to the beginnings of Jewish angelology and demonology, then, is to be challenged to look beyond the conventional modern compartmentalization of knowledge about the world, but also to look beyond the bounds of those types and topics of knowing now commonly distinguished as “religious,” in general, and as “Jewish,” in particular. In the process, we might be able to recover something of what has been lost in the hermeneutical exorcism of modern scholarship whereby ancient worlds have been emptied of their spirits.[18]
That line: modern scholarship has emptied ancient worlds of their spirits. Reed’s diagnosis of modern academia’s magical practices is not to say that turning to the study of spirits produces criticism ipso facto, but rather that spirits are uniquely poised to expose and undo the “scholarly” consciousness that works so hard to empty ancient worlds of their spirits.[19]
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.”[20] Other outcomes are also possible, of course. One could respond to this hermeneutics of exorcism in academic consciousness by privileging religious scholarship thinking this is a correction of what Peter Berger calls “subjective secularism.” Berger meant how religion ceases to be phenomenologically plausible to a subject.[21] But a secular mind would not perform an exorcism, so modern religious worldviews are not what is at stake here. Indeed, Mayra Rivera’s work on the Gospel of John points out that Christian scholars have exorcized their very own Holy Ghost,[22] so modern religious consciousness does not automatically re-spiritualize the ancient world.[23] In fact, it more often does the opposite: monotheizes the lived worlds of pre-Jewish, pre-Christian, ancient societies, thereby erasing the nuances of foreign or material agencies to individual and collective personhood.
The most pernicious outcome of reading ethnographically gathered stories, an exact opposite outcome of Glissant’s political poetics, would reproduce one of academia’s oldest practices: “knowledge as exploration and conquest,”[24] which is achieved by surveillance, extraction, and turning people’s lives into forms of currency. I think about this a lot, as a scholar who also reads ethnographic writing to transform my perception and to develop new perspectives on discourses in ancient Scriptures. If I have learned anything from decolonial education, it is that even the best personal intentions often reproduce privileged structures and patterns of harm.
I want to express gratitude for circles of communication like my recent conversations with Reed and this review discussion in AJR. I highly commend the anthropological, comparative philology of spirits that Carlson has produced here as a much-needed, critical project. It is thoughtfully framed, nuanced, and well written. Before I wrap up, I want to point to future opportunities for critical projects – and to do so, I shift attention to an important recent monograph of critical philological scholarship on spirits, J. Kahamba Kiboko’s Divining the Woman of Endor: African Culture, Postcolonial Hermeneutics, and the Politics of Biblical Translation.[25] Kiboko’s work perfectly captures two major opportunities I see growing out of this stimulating review panel: (1) the study of spirits as projects of criticism which I have discussed at some length above, and (2) deeper engagement with post-colonial scholarship, which I have not emphasized above, but where spirits and ghosts are common-place.
Post-colonial studies (spectrality, structures of power, subaltern subjects) frames an important hole in academic reflection on the critical potential of spirits. I see no irony that, at the time of this writing, I am still waiting for a copy of Divining the Woman of Endor to arrive so I can read it, which I mention as an incriminating example of how academic subjects like myself are situated in a field of familiar and unfamiliar agencies. Indeed, I found only one review of Kiboko’s book in the journal, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft,[26] so even just my process of searching and discovery revealed the precise structures, patterns, and discourses that sustain biblical philology’s hermeneutical exorcism. From Alinda Damsma’s review in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, I learned that Kiboko is from the Democratic Republic of Congo and grew up in a Basanga, Catholic family who honored the traditions of ancient African religions. Kiboko uses her first-hand knowledge of Sanga practices of divination and her academic training in ancient Near Eastern divination practices during the first millennium B.C.E. to interrogate translations of magical practices. An apparently motivating experience, Kiboko was struck by how her native Kisanga Bible translates the “elohim” of Samuel’s ghost in 1 Samuel 28 with mufu, a Sanga word for an angry, malevolent ghost. Such observations prompted her to build out her philological studies of ancient and modern texts yielding a monograph that corrects and critiques translations of divinatory terminology, including in standard English Bibles such as the KJV, RSV, and NRSV. This is mandatory reading.
Kiboko’s post-colonial, comparative philology magnificently showcases a critical project on spirits. First, Kiboko summons to academic consciousness the important field of global Scriptural translations where Christian missionaries’ outsized influence notably censored spirits in biblical texts by using xenophobic English terminology for divination, thaumaturgy, and spirit phenomena. Musa Dube and Sunhee Jun have recently brought attention to such censorship in translations of the Gospel of Mark in both the Setswana and Korean Bibles, respectively.[27] Second, Kiboko divines the textualized ghost of the woman of Endor to articulate an historical project of critical philology in the face of biblical studies’ most durable structure of inequity: the field of historical philology. To any critical scholars shaped by long religious heritages that called the woman of Endor a witch and “satan’s ghost” (Augustine, Luther, and King James, among others),[28] Kiboko’s post-colonial, philological monograph is poised to be especially important. I look forward to reading her project.
Post-script:
I want to say thank you to Reed Carlson for on-going dialogue on this very important, engaging project. I have valued this conversation, even though I was unable to attend SBL for the panel because of Covid. Time seems broken of late. Perhaps broken time has helped crack certain patterns and practices. I note that I am even less able to gather and write my thoughts these days. So, for good or ill, in respect to broken time, I am grateful for the humanizing process that Reed, Frederick Tappenden, and the folks at AJR created that made it possible for my remarks to be included in this published conversation.
[1] See especially David Lambert, “Refreshing Philology: James Barr, Supersessionism, and the State of Biblical Words,” Biblical Interpretation 24:3 (2016), 332-356 and Hindy Najman, “Ethical Reading: The Transformation of the Text and the Self,” JTS 68 (2017): 507–529. See too the international working group Jacqueline Vayntrub hosts, “Renewed Philology,” (https://renewedphilology.yale.edu).
[2] See for example, Gregory Cuéllar, Empire, the British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century: Archival Criticism (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Roland Boer and Fernando F. Segovia (eds.), The Future of the Biblical Past: Envisioning Biblical Studies on a Global Key (Semeia Studies 66; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012); George Aichele, Peter Miscall, and Richard Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room: Historical-Critical and Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible,” JBL 128 (2009): 383-404; and James Barr, History and Ideology in the Old Testament: Biblical Studies at the End of the Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[3] Peter Berger, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age, x. Berger’s famous work with Thomas Luckmann on the relationship of consciousness and social structure can be found in Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1969), 416; Also note, Berger’s sociology of knowledge in modernity is open to criticism from decolonial lenses, see Asonzeh Ukah and Tammy Wilks, “Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, and Theorizing the African Religious Context,” JAAR 85 (2017): 1147–1154.
[4] The original formulation of frame semantics appeared in Charles J. Fillmore, “Frame Semantics and the Nature of Language” Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech (1967): 20–32, and his most recent formulation in idem., “Encounters with Language,” Computational Linguistics 38 (2012): 701–718. Within biblical studies, Stephen Shead, Radical Frame Semantics of Biblical Hebrew (Biblical Interpretation 108; Boston: Brill, 2011). See the helpful orientation to cognitive linguistic approaches to the Hebrew Bible in J. Van der Merwe, “Biblical Hebrew and Cognitive Linguistics: A General Orientation,” in Aaron D. Hornkohl and Khan Geoffrey (eds.), New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew (Semitic Languages and Cultures 7; Open Book Publishers, University of Cambridge, 2021), 641–696.
[5] For example, even many cognitive linguistic studies of the Hebrew Bible seem to trade on the epistemological authority of neuroscience and its mentalist assumptions about bodies, human experience, linguistic communication, and media. I could cite probably hundreds of thousands of authors here, but I will highlight one, Alice Walker’s Hard Times Require Furious Dancing. In the gusts produced by her moving title, it shouldn’t need stating: Biblical philology’s notions of poetics is way too mental.
[6] See also, Kira Hall and Chad Nylep, “Code-Switching, Identity, and Globalization,” in Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin (eds), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Wiley, 2015), 597–619.
[7] See Jacqueline Vayntrub, Laura Quick, and Ingrid Lilly, “Gender and Philology’s Uncommon Sense,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 8 (2019): 381 & 387.
[8] Carsten Ziegert, “Beyond Barr: Biblical Hebrew Semantics at its Crossroads,” EJT 30 (2021): 19–36, 29 and 30. As an alternative to cognitive linguistics, which Ziegert recommends in what I consider to be an outdated form (Lackoff & Johnson), I have been trying to better attend to how texts represent the cultural domains of embodied experience. My approach is deeply influenced by cultural anthropologists and new materialist approaches to language, but my earliest attempt to articulate a corporeal approach to philology followed models of language in new kinship studies. See especially, Ingrid Lilly, “The Fertility of Bones: Towards a Corporeal Philology of Reproduction” HeBAI 8 (2019): 431-447. To name a few phenomenal and inspiring approaches that at various points, have helped me more critically reflect on corporeal philology: Cynthia R. Chapman, The House of the Mother: Social Roles of Maternal Kin in Biblical Hebrew Narrative and Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Yael Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Experience in the Hebrew Bible (Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 545; New York: T & T Clark, 2014); and Elaine James’s “poetry of place” in idem, Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
[9] Lincoln’s account focuses on the transition from myth-based philology to an anthropological model whose worst instantiations viewed history’s uncivilized Other through racist evolutionary framing and triumphalist, nationalist values about language, culture, and people (Volk). Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 64–75.
[10] Penelope Gardner-Chloros, Code-switching (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, New York, 2009), 106.
[11] A notable exception, see the cognitive linguistic study of Ellen Van Wolde, Reframing Biblical Studies: When Language and Text Meet Culture, Cognition, and Context (Penn State University Press, 2009).
[12] Lincoln, 216
[13] Carlson, 65.
[14] Carlson, 99.
[15] Carlson, 105.
[16] As Vayntrub, Quick, and I argue in “Gender and Philology’s Uncommon Sense,” once a philologist is trained to understand language and text as products of their time and place, one cannot help but see that even the very categories and frameworks inherited and reimagined by the philologist are also products of one’s time and place, and, significantly, one’s social positioning. ...The self-reflective philologist’s task, therefore, is to recognize the limitations of what is perceived as natural and common...and to bring distinct and multiple, uncommon perspectives” and lenses to the philological endeavor. Jacqueline Vayntrub, Laura Quick, and Ingrid Lilly, “Gender and Philology’s Uncommon Sense,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 8 (2019): 381 & 387.
[17] Carlson, 23 and 72, discussing Janice Boddy, “Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality,” ARAnth 23 (1994): 407–34, 412 & 427. See also idem, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
[18] Annette Yoshiko Reed, Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 13.
[19] Laura Donaldson’s essay on biblical hauntology makes this very point about the story of the woman of Endor in 1 Samuel 28, who is subject to a double expulsion in both ancient (1 Chr 10:13–14) and modern historical scholarship. Laura Donaldson, “Gospel Hauntings: The Postcolonial Demons of New Testament Criticism” in Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections, ed. Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia (New York: T & T Clark International, 2007), 97–113, esp. 106–109. Carlson’s discussion of the woman certainly contributes to a recovery of her professional skills as a thaumaturgical spirit medium. Carlson, 46–58.
[20] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
[21] Though Berger later rejected his own secularity theory of modernity, he continued writing about the sociology of secular and religious knowledge. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 1967, 107-108.
[22] Rivera uses Spivak’s postcolonial approach to spirits to interpret how the Gospel of John “introduces a distinctive characterization of Spirit as a facilitator of memory” of suppressed pasts (Rivera, 125). In her rich and highly readable theoretical discussion, Rivera interrogates the specifically Christian legacy of ghosts in European theology, putting her finger on an important and striking contradiction: Christianity proclaims a ghost, an on-going agent of presence that mediates an executed Galilean Jew to his followers. And yet, European Christian history especially lofted its Holy Ghost above the fray of lower spirits and numinous powers, constructing a theological spirit with powerful temporal but minimal memorial significance, far more like the European philosophical tradition of Spirit that links subjectivity, ontology, and (imperial) history. Mayra Rivera, “Ghostly Encounters: Spirits, Memory, and the Holy Ghost,” in Stephen D. Moore, Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 118–135, especially 119-120. On this point, Rivera also credits David L. Miller, Hells and Holy Ghosts: A Theopolitics of Christian Belief (New Orleans, Spring Journal Books, 2004), 111.
[23] I would like to highlight Rivera’s phenomenal monograph, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015)
[24] Judith Schlander and Thomas Epstein, “Knowledge as Exploration and Conquest,” Diogenes 40 (1992): 59–73.
[25] J. Kabamba Kiboko, Divining the Woman of Endor: African Culture, Postcolonial Hermeneutics, and the Politics of Biblical Translation (The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017).
[26] Alinda Damsma, “Divining the Woman of Endor: African Culture, Postcolonial Hermeneutics, and the Politics of Biblical Translation by J. Kabamba Kiboko (review),” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 15 (2020): 140-42.
[27] Musa Dube, “Consuming a Colonial Cultural Bomb: Translating Badimo into "Demons" in the Setswana Bible (Matthew 8.28-34; 15.22; 10.8),” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 73 (1999): 33-59; Sunhee Jun, “When Ghost (Gwisin) Becomes demon: Mistranslations of Demon/Unclean Spirit to Gwisin in Mark,” International Journal of Asian Christianity 4 (2021): 94–115.
[28] See Lashonda Slaughter, "King James and the Intellectual Influences of the Witchcraft Phenomenon in England and Scotland." (Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2020), 34–43.